US probes new charge troops killed Iraq civilians

By Alastair Macdonald

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The U.S. military said on Tuesday it
was investigating Iraqi police allegations that its soldiers
shot dead a family of 11 in their home last week.

The probe comes a day after a magazine published
allegations that U.S. Marines killed civilians in another town
in November. A criminal inquiry into those deaths was launched
last week.

Time magazine said a patrol went on a rampage after one of
their comrades was killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha, west
of Baghdad. It published detailed accounts by townspeople.

Last Wednesday in Ishaqi, north of Baghdad, police accused
U.S. troops of shooting dead 11 people, including five
children, while the military said only four people were killed
in all.

“Because of that discrepancy, we have opened an
investigation,” Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a senior U.S.
spokesman in Baghdad, said on Tuesday.

Accusations that American soldiers often kill innocent
people has fueled anger at the occupation among Iraqis over the
past three years. They also complain that little disciplinary
action has resulted in the few cases that are investigated.

Police in Ishaqi, 100 km (60 miles) north of the capital,
said five children under school age, four women and two men
were shot dead by troops in a house that was then blown up.

“It’s a clear and perfect crime without any doubt,” said
local police Colonel Farouq Hussein at the time, saying
autopsies had found that all the victims were shot in the head.

The bodies, their hands bound, had been dumped in one room
before the house was destroyed, Hussein said.

A U.S. military spokesman at the time said the four dead
included a guerrilla and said they died after troops were fired
on from the house as they arrived to arrest an al Qaeda
suspect.

Major Tim Keefe said: “Troops were engaged by enemy fire as
they approached the building … Coalition Forces returned fire
utilizing both air and ground assets.

“There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were
also killed in the firefight. The building … (was)
destroyed.”

HADITHA PROBE

Like Ishaqi, near Samarra, Haditha in western Anbar
province is in an area that has seen much Sunni Arab insurgent
activity.

On November 20, U.S. Marines spokesman Captain Jeffrey Pool
issued a statement saying that on the previous day a roadside
bomb had killed 15 civilians and a Marine. In a later
gunbattle, U.S. and Iraqi troops killed eight insurgents, he
added.

U.S. military officials have since confirmed to Reuters
that that version of the events of November 19 was wrong and
that the 15 civilians were not killed by the blast but were
shot dead.

Time magazine said this week that video of the corpses it
provided to the military in January had prompted the revision.

Among other cases in Anbar last year, an investigation was
launched in July into the killing of a cousin of Iraq’s
ambassador to the United Nations. The envoy said the young
man’s shooting in his home near Haditha was “cold-blooded
murder.”

The results of the investigation have not been published.

This week, Time quoted residents of Haditha accusing
Marines of shooting dead the civilians in their homes. Among
those quoted was nine-year-old Eman Waleed, who said she
remembered troops pointing their guns through the door of her
living room.

“I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest
and then in the head,” she said. “Then they killed my granny.”