Mahmudiyya massacre
 
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The Mahmudiyya massacre was an incident in which on March 12, 2006, near the Iraqi city of al-Mahmudiyya , south of Baghdad , five US soldiers raped and murdered 14-year-old Iraqi woman Abeer Qassim al-Janabi; the girl's parents and 6-year-old sister were also killed. This incident, which was widely regarded as a war crime , led to acts of revenge against the military unit involved.
The course of events
The US Army maintained a traffic control post west of al-Mahmudiyya in al-Yusufiyya. The Qasim family lived in an isolated house around 200 meters away. The house had already been visited several times by the patrol in the days before. According to neighbors, the mother of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim al-Janabi was worried about her daughter's fate and wanted to stay with friends; the father had rejected these worries as unfounded.
On the day of the crime, five soldiers from the six-man control post approached the Qasim family home. They were Steven Green , Paul E. Cortez, James P. Barker, Jesse V. Spielman and Bryan L. Howard, with Howard taking over the external hedge. The soldiers then broke into the house and Green told Abeer's parents and 6-year-old sister to go to another room. He then came back to the rest of the soldiers with an AK-47 in hand, to whom he shouted that he had shot them all. Green and three other soldiers then raped Abeer. They then shot her in the head, doused her body with gasoline, and set it on fire before returning to their base.
The two Abeers brothers were in school at the time of the crime and thus escaped the massacre. They were the first to discover the act, which resulted in trauma.
Reactions
On July 10, a group by the name of the Mujahideen Shura Council declared that they had three US soldiers belonging to the same unit as the perpetrators (502nd Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division ) in “revenge for the desecration of us Sister “and documented this with a video. US military spokesmen initially said the family had been killed by insurgents; al-Mahmudiyya is a denominationally divided city between Shiites and Sunnis and has been the focus of relevant disputes for a long time.
Steven Green attended the funeral of his slain comrades in Arlington , Virginia , and was arrested on the way home in Virginia.
Legal proceedings
The crime was being investigated by a military tribunal set up on a base in Kentucky. In detail, the following judgments were made for the accused soldiers:
- James Barker was sentenced to 90 years in prison with the option of being released after 20 years if conducted well.
- Paul Cortez was sentenced to 100 years in prison on January 22, 2007, with the option of 10 years' release if well behaved.
- Jesse Spielman was sentenced to 110 years in prison on August 3, 2007, with the option of being released after 10 years if well behaved. He had made a partial confession.
- Bryan L. Howard was dishonorably discharged from the US Army and sentenced to 27 months in prison for aiding and abetting.
- Steven D. Green had already been honorably discharged from the US Army on May 16, 2006, before the case became public, for "antisocial personality disorder". He was sentenced to life in prison by a Kentucky civil court on May 21, 2009. The prosecution had called for the death penalty. Green was found hanged on February 16, 2014 in his cell in the United States Penitentiary, Tucson . The authorities assume a suicide .
The defendants' lawyers had complained that the intensive and sometimes sensation-hungry media coverage of the proceedings had prevented a fair trial. However, the relevant complaint was rejected.
Movie
The film Redacted is based on the events of al-Mahmudiyya.
Web links
- Conviction of Spielman ( memento of March 14, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) in: Süddeutsche Zeitung
- Report on the indictment to CNN
- FBI report on Green (PDF)
- Report of the Washington Post
- about Cortez's confession on the BBC
Individual evidence
- ↑ Brett Barrouquere: msnbc.msn.com AP, May 23, 2009
- ↑ news.bbc.co.uk BBC, October 20, 2006
- ↑ guardian.co.uk ( Memento of October 2, 2008 in Internet Archive ) The Guardian , October 20, 2006
- ↑ edition.cnn.com CNN , May 12, 2009
- ↑ Iraq rape soldier given life sentence . The Guardian . November 17, 2006. Retrieved November 1, 2007.
- ↑ Soldier Convicted Of Iraq Rape, Murders Found Hanged In Prison , Huffington Post, February 18, 2014
- ^ Convicted US soldier takes his own life , n-tv.de February 19, 2014