An American Muslim army sergeant has been sentenced to death by a military court for killing two fellow soldiers and wounding 14 others in the first days of the Iraq invasion.
Sergeant Hasan Akbar, of the 101st Airborne Division, expressed regret for throwing grenades into officers’ tents in the Kuwait desert and opening fire on the survivors on 23 March 2003.
”I want to apologise for the attack,” the 34-year-old soldier told the 15-member jury on Wednesday, in a hushed voice and speaking for the first time at his trial. ”I felt that my life was in jeopardy, and I had no other options. I also want to ask you for forgiveness.”
His father, John Akbar, had claimed Hasan was the target of racial and religious taunts from other soldiers, who he said had worn Nazi and Ku Klux Klan tattoos. His defence lawyers also argued that he was mentally ill at the time of the attack.
The prosecution denied he had been victimised and presented the murder as the premeditated act of a religious zealot.
”He is a hate-filled, ideologically-driven murderer,” said the chief prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Mulligan. He pointed to a diary entry in 1997, in which Akbar wrote: ”My life will not be complete unless America is destroyed.”
”I suppose they want to punk me or just humiliate me,” Akbar wrote in another diary entry a month before the attack. ”I am not going to do anything about it as long as I stay here. But as soon as I am in Iraq, I am going to try and kill as many of them as possible.”
Akbar becomes the eighth man awaiting execution on the US military death row. Six are black and one Asian, a fact that has drawn criticism from civil rights activists.
His lawyers said on Friday they would begin the long process of appeals at the civilian court that oversees military justice. Ultimately, the president, as commander-in-chief, may decide whether the lethal injection is given, but that decision is unlikely for several years.
The last soldier to be executed was John Bennett, a black infantryman hanged for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old Austrian girl in 1961.
There were multiple cases of soldiers killing their officers in Vietnam. The victims of what was called ”fragging” in soldier slang were usually junior officers who made their reluctant conscripts go on dangerous patrols. However, by the time the cases reached the higher courts, a moratorium on capital punishment had been imposed. – Guardian Unlimited Â