Last US Marine faces trial over 2005 Iraq killings
Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich
After years of appeals and delays, the last US Marine charged over the 2005 killings of 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha faces a court martial on Thursday in California.
United States troops may have left Iraq, but there is still unfinished business in the legal arena with one of the most controversial criminal cases involving the US military during the nearly nine-year-long Iraq war. Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, 31, faces nine counts of voluntary manslaughter and other charges for his role in the November 19, 2005 deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children.
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Bill Van Auken: Military trial begins for Marine charged in Iraq massacre - The charges stem from the November 19, 2005 killings carried out by a squad of Marines in the city of Haditha in Iraq’s western Anbar Province. The killings took place after the convoy in which the Marines were riding was struck by a roadside bomb, leaving one Marine dead and two wounded. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, Wuterich, according to a Marine investigation, ordered four teenagers and the driver of a passing taxi cab out of the vehicle and shot them dead. According to another Marine, Sergeant Sanick De la Cruz, who participated in the shooting and testified in exchange for immunity, the five were killed as they attempted to surrender. Wuterich has claimed he shot them as they sought to flee, something allowed under the US military occupation’s rules of engagement. De la Cruz admitted to shooting at the five victims after they were dead and then urinating on their bodies. In what turned into a three-hour killing spree, Wuterich, the squad leader, led his men in a room-to-room sweep of three houses, throwing grenades and firing assault rifles. They killed 19 more civilians, including 10 women and children, one of them just three years old, as well as a 76-year-old man confined to a wheelchair.
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