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Iraqi Ambassador to UN says Marines killed his kin "in cold blood"
WaPo - reprinted in SFChronGuess where is alledgedly happened. Go ahead... The U.S. military is investigating an accusation made by Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations that Marines killed his 21-year-old cousin "in cold blood" during a raid last Saturday in a village in the Sunni Muslim- dominated province of Anbar. In a statement released Friday, Ambassador Samir S.M. Sumaidaie said his cousin Mohammed Al-Sumaidaie had been killed when U.S. Marines and Iraqi army units were conducting joint raids in the town of Haditha. According to a witness account compiled by the ambassador, 10 Marines searching for weapons knocked on the door of Mohammed's father's house at 10 a. m. Mohammed, described as a "relatively shy" engineering student, "greeted them pleasantly" and led them to his father's bedroom, where the family stored an old rifle filled with blanks, according to the account. His relatives say they do not know exactly what happened next, but they say several family members, including Mohammad's mother, were gathered in the hallway and heard a thud in the bedroom. Meanwhile, according to Sumaidaie's account, one Marine dragged Mohammed's younger brother, Ali, through the house by his hair and beat him. The family was asked to wait on the porch while the Marines continued searching the house for another hour, the account said. When they finished, an interpreter for the Marines asked Mohammed's mother in Arabic whether it was her son in the bedroom. The account said he told her, "They killed him!" "In the bedroom, Mohammed was found dead and laying in a clotted pool of his blood," according to the account. "All indications point to a killing of an unarmed civilian -- a cold- blooded murder," Sumaidaie said in his statement. A spokesman for the U.S.-led multinational force in Camp Fallujah, in the heart of Iraq's Sunni region, issued a statement saying an inquiry had been started into the incident, noting that the "allegations roughly correspond to an incident involving coalition forces" in the area last Saturday. The investigation could take several weeks, according to the statement. Oh yeah, open and shut. Posted by: .com 2005-07-02 |
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