In a rare honour, a British soldier who died saving seven comrades during combat in Afghanistan has won the Victoria Cross, the nation's highest award, the Ministry of Defence told AFP Wednesday. The BBC said it is the first posthumous VC to be awarded since Britain's war with Argentina over the Falkland islands in 1982.
In a ceremony at Buckingham Palace Queen Elizabeth II is to hand the cross to the widow of Corporal Bryan Budd, 29, who was killed when he single-handedly stormed a Taliban position in Afghanistan in August.
His widow Lorena, a clerk with the Royal Artillery who gave birth to their second child a month after he died, paid a sad tribute to her late husband. "Bryan will always be remembered by me as a loving husband and father to our two beautiful daughters, Isabelle and Imogen," she said in a statement quoted by the BBC.
"The exceptional act of valour and the subsequent award of the Victoria Cross is representative of the sort of man Bryan was." A member of the 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment, he was the 20th British serviceman to die in Afghanistan since the start of operations in November 2001.
With yet another killed Tuesday, a total of 51 British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since the start of US-led operations to oust the hard-line Islamist Taliban regime from power in October 2001.
Britain has pledged an extra 1,400 troops for Afghanistan, taking the number of British soldiers in the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force to 7,700. Most of them are based in the troubled southern province of Helmand, where the Taliban militia have made a strong resurgence since being ousted from Kabul.