An Iraqi army medic on Sunday told a US military hearing of the horrific scene that confronted him in a tiny home south of Baghdad when he found the naked and burned body of a 14-year-old girl allegedly raped and murdered by US soldiers.
The medic testified on the opening day of a hearing to determine whether five US soldiers must stand trial in the March 12 rape-slaying of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi and the killing of her parents and sister in the town of Mahmoudiya.
It is among the worst in a series of cases of alleged killings of civilians and other abuses by US soldiers that have tarnished the US military.
The medic, whose name was withheld for security reasons, testified he was the first responder to enter the house and found the girl sprawled naked in the house, her torso and head burned by flames. She had a single bullet wound under her left eye, he said.
He said he found Abeer's five-year-old sister, Hadeel, in an adjacent room dead from a bullet wound in the head. The children's father, Qassim, and mother, Fikhriya, suffered similar deaths, he said. The mother's abdomen and chest were riddled with bullets, he added.
"I was feeling very bad," he said. "I was sick for almost two weeks."
He told the hearing that because Mahmoudiya's hospital did not have enough space to store the bodies, they were kept in an air-conditioned ambulance overnight, then buried the following day.
Four soldiers -- Sergeant Paul Cortez, Specialist James Barker, Private First Class Jesse Spielman and Private First Class Bryan Howard -- have been accused of rape and murder and could face the death penalty if the case is passed for a court-martial. A fifth, Sergeant Anthony Yribe, is accused of failing to report the attack but is not alleged to have been a direct participant.
A former private, Steven Green, was arrested in North Carolina in June on rape and murder charges in the case. Green, who was discharged from the Army for a "personality disorder," has pleaded not guilty in federal court and is being held without bond.
The commander of the soldiers' battalion in the 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Kunk, testified on Sunday that he recalled hearing Green say "all Iraqis are bad people."
"I told him that that wasn't true and that 90 to 95 percent of the Iraqi people are good people, and they want the same thing that we have in the United States," Kunk said.
Sunday's proceeding is referred to as an Article 32 hearing and is the military equivalent of a grand jury session. It is expected to last several days, and parts will be held in secret.
During cross-examination, Kunk said Green, Cortez and Spielman were "wallowing in self-pity" amid the violence and loss of comrades in the Mahmoudiya area, known in Iraq as the "Triangle of Death." They sought help for combat stress, Kunk said.
Much of Sunday's testimony focused on whether the accused soldiers were suffering from combat stress and whether such emotional trauma might have led them to commit the crimes.
Kunk estimated that about a quarter of the soldiers in his battalion suffered from some form of combat stress, including sleepless nights, nightmares, perpetual nervousness and chronic nausea.
However, "the majority of the platoon, in my opinion, were able to accept the loss of their brothers in arms," Kunk told defense lawyer Captain Jimmie Culp. "I believe every soldier wakes up every morning wanting to do the right thing. I don't believe any soldier wakes up thinking `I want to be screwed up.'"
The medic was among three Iraqi witnesses to testify Sunday. Reporters were not permitted to hear the first two but were allowed back in the hearing room when the medic took the stand.
The military prosecutor, Captain William Fischbach, showed him several photographs of the bloody crime scene to confirm the bodies were as he found them when he entered the room. All of the accused watched expressionless as the photos were shown to attorneys.
But defense lawyers contended the bodies were staged for the pictures. They also questioned whether the victims were shot to death, suggesting they may have already been dead when bullets were fired into their bodies.
The medic acknowledged after questioning he could only assume the family was shot to death.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees
RSS