A United States marine who caused an international furore when he was filmed shooting dead a wounded and unarmed Iraqi will not face a court martial after the military authorities determined he had not broken any rules, it emerged on Thursday.
The news is likely to inflame the insurgency in Iraq, which continued on Thursday with a wave of bombings and ambushes in Baghdad that left at least 24 people dead and wounded scores more.
Videotape of the Fallujah episode, which showed the marine storming a mosque in the city and shooting dead an Iraqi lying on the floor, caused widespread horror when it was broadcast around the world last November.
The scene was filmed by an NBC journalist embedded with US forces in Fallujah, and is accompanied by audio of a marine screaming at his comrades that the Iraqi was pretending to be dead. Then a gunshot is heard, and a marine is heard to say: ”Now he is.”
After it was broadcast, the marine corporal was disarmed and sent to the US to await an investigation.
However, Major General Richard Natonski, commander of the 1st Marine Division, said the marine corporal had acted according to the rules of engagement, and that it was a common tactic of insurgents to lure US troops by faking injury or death.
”He has determined that the actions of the marine in question were consistent with the established rules of engagement, the law of armed conflict and the marine’s inherent right of self-defence,” a statement on the US marine corps website said on Thursday.
Autopsy results and ballistic tests revealed that three Iraqis were killed by gunshots fired from the marine’s M-16 on that day. ”The corporal reasonably believed that they posed a hostile threat to him and his fellow marines,” the statement from the marine corps said.
The latest attacks by insurgents pushed the number of people killed since Iraq’s new government was announced last week past 200 — the most intense period of violence for months. Insurgents appear bent on undermining the fragile new coalition of the prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
The heaviest casualties on Thursday occurred at an army recruitment centre in western Baghdad when a suicide bomber blew himself up after infiltrating a queue of men waiting to enlist. At least 13 people were killed and 15 were wounded.
Also in the west of the capital, gunmen shot dead 10 policemen and then set their vehicles ablaze.
Meanwhile a car bomb in the Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya exploded by a convoy carrying Iraq’s deputy interior minister, killing a bodyguard and wounding six people but leaving the minister unhurt.
Another suicide car bomber struck a US military convoy in Baghdad’s southern Dora district, destroying a truck but causing no US casualties.
Attacks such as Thursday’s follow an established pattern, and target those waiting to join the country’s new security forces — the build-up of which is crucial to the US-led forces’ exit strategy from Iraq.
”We were standing in line, a man walked past, right up to the heavily guarded entrance gate, as if he wanted to ask the guards a question,” Anwar Wasfi, who was in the queue of recruits, told reporters from his hospital bed. ”Suddenly, an explosion occurred, and I was knocked over.”
The attack echoed the previous day’s suicide operation in the city of Irbil, in the Kurdish-run north, where as many as 60 people were killed and more than 150 wounded as they lined up to register for the local police force. It was the deadliest attack in Iraq since the February atrocity in Hilla, south of Baghdad.
According to the Brookings Institution in Washington at least 616 Iraqi police have been killed this year alone.
Tackling the insurgency, which stems mainly from Iraq’s once mighty but now marginalised Sunni minority is the biggest challenge facing Jaafari, who hails from the newly empowered Shia majority.
Responding to the recent surge in violence, US and Iraqi forces have rounded up hundreds of suspected insurgents in Baghdad and across the Sunni triangle. However, the insurgents seem to retain the capacity to stage large and lethal attacks. – Guardian Unlimited Â