The US security company Blackwater agreed on Thursday to pay compensation over the killing of Iraqi civilians by company guards accused of reckless disregard for human life.
The deal comes days after a US court threw out the prosecution of five of the guards over a notorious slaughter of up to 17 people in Baghdad.
The settlement amounts to an implicit admission by the highly secretive company that some of its guards were responsible for a series of unjustifiable killings. Blackwater appears to have reached the deal to avoid a court hearing that threatened to force the company to lay bare what critics contend was a policy of shooting first, as well as the involvement of its employees in an array of criminal activities.
Blackwater, which has since renamed itself Xe after a deluge of bad publicity over its actions in Iraq, did not release details of the settlement of seven lawsuits that accused the company of a pattern of illegal activity and reckless killings.
The lawsuits accuse Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a former member of navy special forces, of running a private army that “roamed the streets of Baghdad killing innocent civilians.”
Among the cases was the killing of three members of an Iraqi family, including a nine-year-old boy, when Blackwater guards opened fire on their car as they drove to Baghdad airport in July 2007.
Other lawsuits filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York related to the killing of an Iraqi guard and the fatal shooting of three people guarding the state-run Iraqi Media Network by a Blackwater sniper. The Iraqi police called the shootings an “act of terrorism.”
The highest-profile case was on behalf of the families of three of up to 17 Iraqis killed by Blackwater guards in Baghdad’s Nisoor square in 2007.
Five Blackwater guards were prosecuted in the US over the killings, but a judge threw out the charges on procedural grounds, including that the accused men had been forced to incriminate themselves. The guards could not be prosecuted in Iraq because of an immunity agreement imposed by Washington on the interim administration in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion.
The decision has led to accusations that Blackwater was in effect operating outside the law, which contributed to a climate of impunity and reckless use of weapons. The company has since been barred from the country by the Iraqi government.
Critics allege that US officials contributed to the climate of impunity by protecting Blackwater guards responsible for evidently illegal killings. Those include the shooting dead three years ago of an Iraqi security guard to the country’s vice-president while he was on duty at the prime minister’s compound.
The Iraqi government alleges that the guard was shot by a drunken Blackwater employee, who was then spirited out of the country by the US Department of State, which attempted to keep his identity secret.
The Iraqi government said on Monday that it would launch its own lawsuits against Blackwater in the US and Iraqi courts.
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