Prince Harry speaks out about Las Vegas nude photos, privacy

By Nardine Saad

Jan. 22, 2013 12 AM PT

Prince Harry is speaking out for the first time about those naked photos of him that caused a royal kerfuffle over the summer.

“It was probably a classic example of me probably being too much army, and not enough prince. It’s a simple case of that,” the royal said during a BBC interview at his military base in Afghanistan.

“Back home all my close friends rallied round me and were great.”

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The au naturel photos were taken of the prince, 28, in Las Vegas last August after he lost a game of strip billiards. They were obtained by TMZ and published online, then later published in Britain’s Sun tabloid.

“Every single mobile phone has got a camera on it now,” he said in the interview. “I probably let myself down, let my family down and let other people down but at the end of the day I was in a private area and there should be a certain amount of privacy that one should expect.”

Those candid moments can turn into a feeding frenzy for the paparazzi, who are blamed for the death of Princess Diana, Harry’s mother, who died in a car accident while being pursued by photographers in Paris. Despite Prince Charles telling his son to avoid reading stories about them in the tabs, Harry still does.

“Of course I read it,” he said. “If there’s a story and something that’s being written, I want to know what’s being said. But all it does is just upset me and anger me. I don’t believe that there’s any such thing as private life anymore.”

Harry, who is simply called Captain Wales in the army, prefers not getting any special treatment.

“It’s very easy to completely forget about who I am when I’m in the army. I am one of the guys, I don’t get treated any differently,” he said.

The royal-turned-Apache helicopter pilot started his second tour in Afghanistan in September and concluded the deployment on Jan. 21. He admitted that he shot at Taliban insurgents while co-piloting an attack helicopter. “Take a life to save a life,” he said.

Watch more more snippets of the interview below.

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