Prince Harry 'has turned against military family after trashing his birth family'

Prince Harry has suffered furious backlash after claiming he killed 25 Taliban soldiers and referring to them as "chess pieces" in his memoir Spare.

Colonel Tim Collins, who completed three tours with the SAS and UK Special Forces, has hit out at the Duke of Sussex's comment .

He said: “Leonardo Da Vinci once said: 'He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year'.

“Prince Harry's latest revelations in his memoir 'Spare' are clearly a tragic money-making scam to fund the lifestyle he can't afford and someone else has chosen.

“Amongst his assertions is a claim that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan.

“That's not how you behave in the Army; it's not how we think. He has badly let the side down.

“We don't do notches on the rifle butt. We never did.

“The British Army was deployed to Afghanistan to assist the lawful government and the benighted people – not to kill them.

“We lost people dead and insurgents also died – as did some innocents caught in the conflict. But that was a regrettable consequence of a lawful intervention with the best intentions.

“Harry has now turned against the other family, the military, that once embraced him having trashed his birth family.”

Speaking to Forces News, he added: “I wonder whose path he has chosen? In the end, I see only disappointment and misery in his pursuit of riches he does not need and his rejection of family and comradely love that he badly needs.”

The backlash Prince Harry has faced follows the publication of an extract in his autobiography Spare, where he discusses killing members of the Taliban.

The Duke wrote: "Most soldiers don't know exactly how many kills they have to their credit. Under battle conditions, you often fire indiscriminately.

"However, in the age of Apaches and laptops, everything I did in the course of two tours of duty was recorded and time-stamped.

"I could always tell exactly how many enemy combatants I had killed. And it seemed essential for me not to be afraid of that figure.

"Among the many things I learned in the Armed Forces, one of the most important was to be accountable for my own actions."

He continued: "So my number: twenty-five.

"When I found myself plunged in the heat and confusion of combat I didn't think of those 25 as people.

"They were chess pieces removed from the board. Bad people eliminated before they could kill good people."