Four US Navy commandos have been charged with abusing prisoners in Iraq, including one prisoner who was beaten and later died at Abu Ghraib prison in November 2003, the Navy said Friday.
More sailors may face charges after the completion of a Navy investigation into another detainee death, a Navy official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the probe is continuing.
The Navy said the other death was in April 2004 but it provided no further information.
The only known detainee death in April 2004 was Fahin Ali Gumaa, 44, who died April 28, several days after receiving multiple gunshot wounds in Baghdad, according to Pentagon records. The circumstances of his shooting are unclear and it is not known whether SEALs were involved.
A Navy statement released Friday did not identify the four sailors who have been charged. They are members of a Sea-Air-Land, or SEAL, unit known as SEAL Team-7, which is a secretive counterterrorist group that sometimes operated in Iraq with CIA officers. It is based at Coronado, California.
The four were notified Thursday of the criminal charges filed against them, the Navy said. Pretrial hearings known as Article 32 proceedings are likely to be initiated soon, the Navy official said.
The charges are assault, aggravated assault, mistreatment of detainees, failure to report mistreatment of detainees and soliciting others to commit an offense.
The probe was done by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service.
The Army has taken most of the heat for mistreatment of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan because it was the main service involved at Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were physically abused and sexually humiliated by military police and intelligence soldiers in the fall of last year.
Seven Army military police soldiers have been charged with prisoner abuse, and charges are expected against others in the Army. The cases announced Friday are the first against members of the Navy.
The Navy did not say how many cases were filed against each of the individual SEALs. Nor did it say how many instances of detainee abuse were involved, although it said one instance was the death of Manadel al-Jamadi, who was captured by a SEAL team on Nov. 4, 2003.
Al-Jamadi was thought to have been connected with an attack on a facility of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In detaining al-Jamadi, a SEAL subdued him by hitting him on the side of the head with the butt of a gun, according to an Army report released last month.
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