"I am troubled by the initial news stories," Bush said at the White House after a meeting with Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who was visiting Washington on Wednesday.

"If, in fact, laws were broken, there will be punishment," the US president said, adding: "Those who violated the law, if they did, will be punished."

The Bush administration has promised full public disclosure of the findings of military probes into the alleged killing of at least 24 civilians by US Marines in Iraq.

Two separate probes are currently underway by the US Defense Department into the killings, and officials have said those investigations were near completion.

The investigations aim to learn what happened on November 19, 2005 in Haditha and how the incident was handled by commanding officers in the military hierarchy.

Whatever the outcome of the Pentagon investigations, the allegations could hamper US military operations that require cooperation with Iraqi security forces and citizens, a US general said on Wednesday.

"Allegations such as this, regardless of how they are born out by the facts, can have an effect on the ability of US forces to continue to operate," said General Carter Ham, deputy director for regional operations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"We do rely very heavily and the Iraqi security forces rely heavily on the support from the Iraqi people, and anything that tends to diminish that obviously is not helpful to what we're trying to do," Ham told a press conference in Washington.

A prominent US lawmaker and others have accused the military of trying to cover up the November incident, which has become the most serious scandal to dog US-led coalition forces in Iraq since revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Bush recently referred to the Abu Ghraib scandal, which triggered outrage in the Middle East and across the Islamic world, as the biggest mistake committed by Americans in Iraq.

Marine Corporal James Crossman, who was deployed in Haditha the day the killings occurred and was injured in a bomb attack there, told CNN television in an interview that some of his fellow marines "might have got scared".

"Like, after seeing so much death and destruction, pretty soon you just become numb and really don't think about it anymore," Crossman, who suffered a broken back and pelvis, said.

Marines went on a house-to-house search after the bomb exploded injuring Crossman and killing another marine.

The allegations of indiscriminate killing in Haditha threaten to damage the difficult US mission in Iraq as well as Bush's attempts to rally flagging public support for the war.

The case has already been compared with the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war. The killing of hundreds of civilians by US soldiers on March 16, 1968 helped bolster opposition to that war.

Bush said, however, that rather than try to conceal the alleged crimes, the marines are compelled to seek justice in the case.

"Nobody is more concerned about these allegations than the Marine Corps," Bush said.

The president said he had discussed the matter with General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The shooting came to light in a Time magazine report in late March which cited an Iraqi human rights group and Haditha residents.

According to the reports, after the bomb detonated, killing one marine, marines barged into a home in the Iraqi village, throwing grenades and shooting several people, including women and children, in cold blood.

The official version of events had insisted the civilians were killed in a roadside bomb.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that death certificates show all the Iraqi victims in Haditha had gunshot wounds, mostly to the head and chest.

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