BAGHDAD,
March 21, 2006 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – US occupation
forces are embroiled in a new Iraq scandal, amid charges of killing
twenty six Iraqi civilians in two separate incidents.
"It's
a clear and perfect crime without any doubt," Farouq Hussein, a
police colonel in the town of Ishaqi, north of Baghdad, told Reuters on
Tuesday, March 21.
Iraqi
police accused US occupation forces of gunning down a family of 11 in
their home last week.
They
said five children under school age, four women and two men were killed
by US troops.
Hussein
said autopsies had found that the victims were shot in the head and the
bodies had been dumped in one room before the house was destroyed.
"There
was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the
firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed," Major Tim Keefe said.
"Because
of that discrepancy, we have opened an investigation," Lieutenant
Colonel Barry Johnson, a senior US spokesman in Baghdad, said Tuesday.
Accusations
that trigger-happy US soldiers often kill civilians and that little
disciplinary action has resulted in the few cases investigated have
aroused Iraqi anger since the invasion, according to Reuters.
In
the first such case, a British soldier has quit the army in disgust of
the "illegal and immoral" practices of the US-led forces in
Iraq.
"As
far as the Americans were concerned, the Iraqi people were sub-human,
untermenschen," Ben Griffin, a trooper in the Special Air Service's
counter-terrorist team, told the Telegraph on Sunday, March 12,
using the term used by the Nazis to describe Jews and Russians.
Massacre
This
comes one day after Time magazine revealed that US forces killed
an Iraqi family of 15 near the western Iraqi town of Haditha last
November.
The
magazine said that US troops had gone on rampage after their patrol was
attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women
and three children.
The
US military claimed at the time that the Iraqi civilians were killed by
gunmen.
But
eyewitnesses and local officials interviewed by the Time revealed
that the victims were killed by US Marines.
A
January US investigation, launched after the magazine presented military
officials with the Iraqis' accounts, showed that the 15 civilians died
at the hands of the US Marines, contrary to the initial military
account.
The
magazine said it obtained a videotape about the massacre taken by a
local journalism student.
The
pictures show the victims' bodies being carried from their homes and in
the mortuary.
Recalling
the grisly crime, nine-year-old Eman Waleed said the US marines had
killed all members of her family.
"I
watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the
head," said a tearful Waleed.
"Then
they killed my granny."
Click
to read Time's interviews
