Winks Blog

Seven US Marines Charged with Murder of Iraqi Civilian

Breaking News:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Seven U.S. Marines and a Navy medical corpsman have been charged with murder in the April killing of an Iraqi civilian near the town of Hamdaniya, the Marine Corps announced Wednesday.

The eight also are chaged with kidnapping and conspiracy, Marine Col. Stewart Navarre said at Camp Pendleton, California.

The troops are accused of killing 54-year-old Hasham Ibrahim Awad, a disabled veteran of Iraq's war with Iran in the 1980s, on April 26. His family told CNN the Marines were pressuring him to act as an informer, hoping to learn who was planting roadside bombs and carrying out other attacks around Hamdaniya, on Baghdad's western outskirts.

The Americans carried Awad from his home to the main road through town, said his brother, Sadoon. Police turned over Awad's body to relatives the next day, along with an assault rifle and shovel his family says were planted to make him look like an insurgent.

U.S. troops offered $2,000 in compensation for his brother's death, then $10,000, said Sadoon Awad. He said he considered the offers an attempt to buy his family's silence.

"But I refused," he told CNN. "I told them, 'I don't need money.' I told them, 'The truth is that you took my brother, you tortured him, and you killed him, although he was disabled and old.'"

Iraqi officials brought the allegation to Marine commanders at a May 1 meeting, prompting the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Richard Zilmer, to call for an investigation.

Some Marines have admitted the circumstances of the man's death were staged, a military officer with direct knowledge of the Navy's preliminary findings told CNN earlier this month.

Investigators recently returned Awad's body after exhuming it and taking it to the United States for tests, his brother said. He said he expects to attend the trial but did not know whether he would be called as a witness.

Meanwhile, defense lawyers have decried information leaks from the probe, while their clients are being held in pretrial confinement.

The incident is unrelated to a criminal investigation into the killings of 24 Iraqi civilians in the Anbar province town of Haditha in November.

Investigations into both incidents spurred the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Mike Hagee, to lecture his 180,000 Marines on what he called "the American way of war" during a trip to Iraq in early June.


Have a nice day.

posted by Wink @ 1:33 PM