Army heroes have savaged Prince Harry ’s claim he killed 25 Taliban in Afghanistan.
They warned the outrageous boast in his new book puts fellow soldiers in added peril.
Iraq veteran Col Tim Collins said: “Having trashed his birth family, Harry has now turned against his other family, the military, that once embraced him.”
Others said he had dehumanised insurgents by calling them “chess pieces” while the Taliban accused him of “war crimes”.
Retired Col Collins, famed for an inspired speech on the eve of battle in 2003, added: “This is not how we behave in the Army.”
He went on to say that the revelations in the memoir, which targets members of the Royal Family, were “a tragic money-making scam”.
Ex-national security adviser Lord Darroch said he “would have advised against” the wild claim.
And former commando Ben McBean told Harry to “shut up”. In the book, for which he was paid a reported $20million, Harry details how he killed 25 Taliban on six missions during his second front-line tour in 2012.
He says he did not think of them as “people” but instead as “chess pieces” to be taken off the board.
Former Defence Secretary John Hutton said his comments were “wrong on every level”.
The Labour peer added: “It’s absolutely not the right thing for anyone to be saying.
“It diminishes him and it’s not what we expect from someone who has held the positions of authority and responsibility that he has previously occupied.”
Asked if it was a security risk, Lord Hutton replied: “I feel instinctively this is not the proper subject for someone like him to be talking about in public.”
Taliban spokesman Khalid Zadran said: “The perpetrators of such crimes will one day be brought to the international court and criminals like Harry who proudly confess their crimes will be brought in front of the international community.”
At a checkpoint on the Iran border, Taliban chief Molavi Agha Gol, 32, said: “We are still ruling here but he has fled to his grandmother’s palace.
“He’s nothing but a big-mouth loser who has been trying to get attention.”
The Ministry of Defence said it did not comment on operational details for “security reasons”.
