Or.... how about this "good news":
G.I.'s Investigated in Slayings of 4 and Rape in Iraq
By EDWARD WONG
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. |
