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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
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July 1st, 2006 - G.I.’s
Investigated in Slayings of 4 and Rape in Iraq |
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G.I.'s Investigated in
Slayings of 4 and Rape in Iraq New York Times By Edward Wong July 1, 2006 Baghdad, Iraq, June 30 - The
American military is investigating accusations that soldiers raped an Iraqi woman
in her home and killed her and three family members, including a child,
American officials said Friday. The investigation is the
fourth into suspected killings of unarmed Iraqis by American soldiers
announced by the military in June. In May, it was disclosed that the military
was conducting an inquiry into the deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha last
November. The alleged rape and
killings took place March 12 in the vicinity of the volatile market town of
Mahmudiya, an insurgent stronghold about 20 miles south of Baghdad. The
killing of the family was originally reported by the military as due to
"insurgent activity," American officials said. A senior police official in
Mahmudiya said in a telephone interview that he received a report of the
killings in March. The victims were a woman, her child, her husband and the
husband's brother, he said. The official, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity for fear of reprisals, said a sheik from the family's tribe
immediately reported the episode to the police. The American investigation
began June 24, one day after two soldiers "reported alleged coalition
force involvement" in the deaths of the Iraqi civilians, the military
said in a written statement. A preliminary inquiry conducted after that report
determined that there was sufficient evidence to merit a criminal
investigation, the military said. "This is going to be a
by-the-numbers, by-the-book investigation," Maj. Todd Breasseale, a
military spokesman, said in a telephone interview. He said Maj. Gen. J. D.
Thurman, commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, which oversees the
capital and areas immediately to the south, ordered an inquiry "the
minute he got the news." The American officials, who
spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak publicly about
possible criminal proceedings, said the investigation involved five soldiers
from the 502nd Infantry Regiment, attached to the Fourth Infantry Division. A senior American official
confirmed several details first reported by The Associated Press on Friday,
including that the soldiers were accused of raping the woman, before killing
her and three other family members and possibly burning her body. An Army
official in Washington also confirmed that the inquiry was focused on
soldiers of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, adding, "The allegation is one
of rape and murder." Earlier this month, two
soldiers from the same unit were abducted while guarding a traffic control
point in the town of Yusufiya and killed by insurgents, and their mutilated
bodies were later found along a road booby-trapped with hidden explosives. A
third soldier was killed in Yusufiya at the time of the ambush. The alleged rape and
killings came to light after a soldier felt compelled to talk about it in a
"counseling-type session," after the discovery of the bodies of his
kidnapped colleagues, The Associated Press reported. The soldier who
originally disclosed the alleged killings had heard about them but had not
taken part in them, The A.P. said. One soldier has admitted his
role and has been arrested; others have had their weapons taken away and are
confined to their base in Mahmudiya, American officials said. The soldiers
under investigation are apparently from the same platoon as the three killed
in Yusufiya. Both Mahmudiya and Yusufiya
are in the so-called Triangle of Death, an extremely dangerous area along the
Euphrates River valley that has become a melting pot of insurgents, criminal
gangs and lawless tribes. The American military considers the region a
crucial strategic approach to Baghdad, with important highways running south
to the holy city of Najaf and the oil center of Basra, but has never been
able to establish control in the region. This latest investigation
comes at a time of increasing scrutiny over the killings of civilians by
American troops in Iraq. In Haditha, marines are accused of executing as many
as 24 unarmed civilians after a fellow marine was killed by a roadside bomb.
On June 1, as the political furor over Haditha was building, the Iraqi prime
minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, lashed out at the American military, saying
that violence against Iraqi civilians by American troops was a "regular
occurrence." Major Breasseale said Friday
that he did not know when results of the Haditha investigation would be made
public. In June, the Army charged
four American soldiers suspected of killing three detainees in Iraq and then
threatening another American soldier with death if he reported the shootings. Two days later, the Marine
Corps said it had charged seven marines and one Navy corpsman with murder and
kidnapping in the April killing of an Iraqi man in a village on the western
outskirts of Baghdad. In that episode, the assailants are accused of planting
a Kalashnikov rifle and shovel by the body of the victim to frame him as an
insurgent after shooting him in the face four times. Last Sunday, the military
said two members of the Pennsylvania National Guard had been charged with
involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of an unarmed Iraqi man on
Feb. 15. The announcement of the
investigation in Mahmudiya came as the military said Friday that three
soldiers had been killed in separate combat incidents. One died Thursday
night in a bombing during a foot patrol south of Baghdad. Another was killed
in an explosion while on patrol on Thursday night near Balad, north of the
capital; that blast also wounded a soldier. The third death occurred Thursday
in the northern city of Mosul, when a soldier was killed by small-arms fire. At least 60 American
soldiers died in Iraq in June, a slight decline from 69 in May and 76 in
April. Yet, that was almost twice as many as in March, which, at 31, had the
second-lowest monthly fatality count of the war. Until the sharp spike in
April, American fatalities had been dropping for five straight months.
American commanders at the time attributed the decline to a shift by
insurgents to concentrating attacks on Iraqi civilians and local security
forces, and to the fact that Americans were leaving their bases less often on
operations and patrols. Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a
spokesman for the American command, said he saw no clear reason for the rise
in fatalities after March or the small drop in June. "We are not
inclined to attribute the rise and fall in numbers to any particular factor,"
he said. "Coalition forces remain a priority target for terrorists and
insurgents, even though we've also seen a steady increase in attacks on
civilians and Iraqi security forces as their primary targets." Deaths of Iraqi civilians
dropped in June from previous months, according to a rough estimate by the
Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an independent Web site. At least 840 Iraqi
civilians died in June, compared with an all-time high of 1,100 the previous
month, according to the site, which counts deaths from news reports. The June
toll was about the same as that in February, the month that hundreds of
civilians were killed in sectarian bloodletting after the bombing of a sacred
Shiite shrine. Three civilians were killed
Friday when a bomb exploded in a minibus in Kirkuk, and an Iraqi soldier died
in another bombing in the west of the city, police officials said. Gunmen
killed five Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint south of Kirkuk. At least 21
bodies were found across Iraq, many showing signs of torture. One of them was
a boy in Baghdad between the ages of 4 and 6 who had been tortured and shot
in the head, an Interior Ministry official said. The Russian government
offered $10 million for information leading to the killers of five Russian
Embassy workers here. On Wednesday, President Vladimir V. Putin ordered
Russian special services to hunt down and kill those responsible. In an Internet audio message
posted Thursday night, Osama bin Laden praised Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the
Jordanian militant killed in an American airstrike this month. Mr. bin Laden
defended the copious bloodshed engineered by Mr. Zarqawi and his group, Al
Qaeda in Mesopotamia, saying that Mr. Zarqawi "had clear instructions to
concentrate his fighting on the occupying invaders" and "make
neutral those who wished to be neutral," according to a translation by
the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist Internet postings. Mr. bin Laden
vowed that the struggle would continue in Iraq and demanded that the ruler of
Jordan, King Abdullah II, allow Mr. Zarqawi to be buried in his hometown of
Zarqa, Jordan. Mona Mahmoud contributed
reporting from Baghdad for this article, and Thom Shanker from Washington. Copyright 2006 The New York
Times Company External link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/01/world/01iraq.html |