The first of 12 US soldiers accused of terrorizing unarmed civilians as part of a rogue infantry platoon in Afghanistan will face a court-martial on murder charges and other offenses, the military said on Friday.
US Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, 22, from Wasilla, Alaska, who could face the death penalty if convicted, is charged with three counts of premeditated murder in the deaths of Afghan civilians he is accused of killing for sport.
His case was referred to general court-martial this week at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington, the home base of his Army unit, but no trial date has been set, according to a statement from the base.
The case has drawn intense media attention because Morlock and fellow soldiers are accused of taking ghoulish photos of corpses and taking body parts as war trophies — inflammatory charges that recall worldwide outrage at pictures of nude Iraqi prisoners of war taken by US military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The prosecution of all 12 men stems from their recent deployment as part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, recently renamed the 2nd Stryker Brigade, in Kandahar Province, a stronghold for Taliban insurgents.
During the first evidentiary hearing on the case last month, a so-called Article 32 proceeding, prosecutors characterized Morlock as the right-hand man to the accused ringleader, Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs.
Morlock’s civilian lawyer, Michael Waddington, said then that the three slain Afghans — two killed by grenades and rifle fire, one by gunfire only — were victims of a “rogue platoon running around killing people,” and that his client, while present, “did not cause the deaths of any of these individuals.”
A second such hearing had been scheduled for Tuesday for a soldier charged with conspiracy to commit murder of Afghan civilians, but base spokeswoman Major Kathleen Turner said it had been postponed indefinitely.
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