Blackwater security guards involved in a Baghdad shootout last month that left up to 17 Iraqi civilians dead were "obviously wrong," the Washington Post reported a senior US military official as saying yesterday.
The unnamed official said the US military reports from the scene of the Sept. 16 incident suggested the US private security firm was to blame for the deaths, and that its employees in Iraq were trigger-happy.
"It was obviously excessive, it was obviously wrong," the official told the newspaper.
"The civilians that were fired upon, they didn't have any weapons to fire back at them. And none of the IP [Iraqi police] or any of the local security forces fired back at them," he said.
In reports after the incident, Blackwater executives insisted their teams had come under fire in Baghdad's Nisour Square.
But according to US military officials cited in a US Congress report, Blackwater's teams, contracted to protect US State Department diplomats and other officials in Iraq, behaved like impervious "cowboys" in Iraq.
"They tend to overreact to a lot of things," the US military official told the Post. "When it comes to shooting and firing, they tend to shoot quicker than others."
The official said that Blackwater has resisted sharing information with the US military on the incident, and prevented military officials from contacting company managers in Baghdad.
On Thursday the FBI took over the State Department's investigation into Blackwater, as US lawmakers voted to make private security firms in Iraq subject to action in US courts.
Meanwhile, US operations near the Iraqi city of Baqubah yesterday killed at least 25 people the US military said were "criminals," but Iraqi officials said women and children were among the dead.
A US military statement said a strike targeted an Iranian-linked commander believed to be smuggling weapons across the border from Iran, accused by the US of fueling the sectarian conflict in Iraq.
US aircraft killed the insurgents and destroyed two houses after a heavy firefight near Baqubah, 60km north of Baghdad, during which rebels fired rocket-propelled grenades, it said.
Iraqi defense ministry officials and witnesses said at least 17 Iraqis, including women and children, were killed in what appeared to be part of the same operations.
"Seventeen people were killed, 27 were wounded and eight are missing including women and children," a ministry official said.
US helicopters attacked the village of al-Jayzani, near the mainly Shiite town of al-Khalis, at around 2am, destroying at least four houses and killing up to 25 people, witnesses said.
Ahmed Mohammed, 31, said he had traveled with 15 wounded from the area to the City Medical Hospital in Baghdad.
"There are 24 bodies on the ground in the village and 25 others wounded in al-Khalis hospital," he said.
"As for the operation in question, we have no reports that any Iraqi civilians were killed as a result of this operation," US military spokesman Major Winfield Danielson said. "Coalition forces only engage hostile threats and take every precaution to protect innocent civilians."
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