US Troops Kill Injured Iraqi Prisoner on Film

According to NBC correspondent Kevin Sites, who wrote the pool report on the incident, one marine noticed one of the prisoners inside the Fallujah mosque was still breathing, Reuters reported.

A marine can be heard saying on the pool footage provided to Reuters Television: “He’s [expletive] faking he’s dead. He faking he’s [expletive] dead.”

“The marine then raises his rifle and fires into the man’s head. The pictures are too graphic for us to broadcast,” Sites said. No images of the shooting were shown in the footage provided to Reuters.

Sites said the shot prisoner “did not appear to be armed or threatening in any way”.

“He’s dead now,” one marine in the squad shouts after the shooting.

NBC said the film of the man being shot in the head was “too gruesome” to be seen on screens.

Sites said the mosque had been used by Iraqi fighters to attack US forces, who stormed it and an adjacent building, killing 10 fighters and wounding five, Reuters said.

He added the wounded had been left in the mosque for others to pick up and move to the rear for treatment. No reason was given why that had not happened, it added.

The sequence was captured on film by an embedded camera operator who entered the mosque with the marine squad.

Other networks including CNN, ABC and Fox News also showed the sequence.

Investigation

Lieutentant Colonel Bob Miller, a US military judge leading an investigation into the shooting, told NBC in an interview that the rules of engagement in Iraq “authorize the marines to use force when presented with a hostile act or hostile intent.”

Miller added: “Any wounded — even in this case wounded — insurgent, who does not pose a threat would not be considered hostile.”

The Defense Department in Washington said it had no information about the incident.

International law experts in the Middle East have expressed fury at the incident which, they said, is a flagrant violation on Geneva Convention on the treatment of war prisoners.

“The first Protocol added to the Geneva Convention of 1949 in1977 stipulates that injured prisoners of war must enjoy adequate medical and human treatment. What that American marine did in that mosque in Fallujah is a war crime and he must be tried accordingly by an independent authority,” head of International Law Dept. at Cairo University , professor Salah Amer, told Al-Jazeera TV Tuesday, November16 .

“But Washington had already taken precautions against trying its soldiers before the International Court of Justice by signing bilateral relations with the Iraqi Governing Council it had installed to avoid paying for war crimes,” he added.

Amnesty International Worried

Hours before the war crime in the Fallujah mosque came to light, human rights watchdog Amnesty International has said it was deeply concerned the rules of war designed to protect civilians and combatants have been violated in Fallujah.

“Amnesty International fears that civilians have been killed, in contravention of international humanitarian law, as a result of failure by parties to the fighting to take necessary precautions to protect non-combatants,” the London-based group said in a report on its website, according to AFP.

“We are not getting the full picture of what is going on in Fallujah,” Amnesty spokeswoman Nicole Choueiry told AFP Monday.

“Some clarification needs to be made, not only to Amnesty but to the whole world because no one has a clear picture of what is going on.

“It’s really unclear whether they have been abiding by (international law) or not, but there are increasingly worrying reports in the media,” Choueiry said.

“There are increasing reports that civilians have died and we have been asking for clarifications as to the rules of engagement and of the total civilian casualties,” she said.

“There are also worrying reports about the insurgents using civilian areas or civilian targets to lure in combatants.”

In one incident, some Iraqis are reported to have come out of a building waving a white flag, Amnesty said. When a US Marine approached this group, “insurgents opened fire from different directions”.

Twenty Iraqi medical staff and dozens of other civilians were killed when a missile hit a clinic on November9 , according to reports from a doctor who survived the strike, the group said.

On November 11 a British television program, Channel Four News, broadcast footage in which a US soldier appeared to have fired one shot in the direction of a wounded insurgent who was off screen.

The soldier then walked away and said “he’s gone”, Amnesty said.