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Eyewitnesses said badly-injured
Zarqawi was beaten to death by US soldiers. (Reuters)
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CAIRO – Iraqi
eyewitnesses on Sunday, June 11, accused the
US forces of having beaten to death the
badly-injured Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi after he survived a US air
strike on his hideout, an accusation
immediately denied by the US army.
"We found the body of
a big man, middle-aged. There was life in him
still," Ali Abbas, 25, a laborer,
recalled in an interview with the Sunday
Times.
The US and the Iraqi
government announced last Thursday, June 8,
that Zarqawi and seven of his associates were
killed a day earlier in a US air strike on a
farmhouse in the village of Hibhib, near the
western Iraqi city of Baqouba.
An F-16 launched two 500
pound (227 kilogram) bombs, one laser-guided
and one GPS-guided, at the house.
"It took seven of us
to move him from within the rubble and carry
him out about 100 meters," said Abbas,
referring to the bombed house.
"He had a black
dishdasha [robe]. His hair was longish and his
beard soft black. He just moaned over and over
again. He had an injury to the back of his
head."
Edgy Americans
Abbas recalled that as they
dragged the man from under the ruins, an
ambulance and Iraqi forces turned up, totally
14 people on the scene.
He added that they had
barely placed the wounded in the ambulance when
seven US helicopters landed by the house and
four Humvees rumbled through the dust.
"They were shouting
and screaming and in a very tense and agitated
mood," said Abbas.
"They lined us up in a
ditch and told us to turn our faces. We
thought they were going to execute us. I
started reciting Quran verses to myself."
The Americans then took the
injured man from the ambulance and placed his
stretcher on the ground.
"The Americans tore
his dishdasha and they kept on asking him
through an interpreter, ‘What is your name,
what is your name?’," said Abbas.
They later started to kick
him in the chest, said Abbas and an Iraqi
policeman also there.
"They kept kicking
him, shouting, ‘What’s your name?’, but
the man only moaned and said nothing,"
said Abbas.
He added that as the small
crowd of Iraqis looked on, the man grew paler
and began bleeding from his mouth and nose.
Abbas estimates it took
about a quarter of an hour for him to die from
the time when he was removed from the
ambulance.
When he saw pictures of the
dead Zarqawi on television the next day, with
his face swollen, cheeks bruised, eyes closed
with streaks of blood beneath his skull he was
sure it was the same man.
Discounted
The Observer also
quoted another eyewitness as confirming the
report.
The man told the British
weekly that US soldiers pulled out a man
resembling Zarqawi from an ambulance where
locals had placed him, wrapped his dishdasha
around his head and "battered him
severely till he died".
The two British newspapers
carried US military confirmation that Zarqawi
was not dead in the strike and that he had
tried to roll off the stretcher when he
realized the soldiers' identity.
The Observer,
however, said that although there was no
corroboration of the claims, revelations of
revenge killings by US troops "means it
cannot be discounted".
Last November, US forces
killed 24 Iraqi civilians in cold blood in
Haditha as they went on rampage after the
killing of a US Marine in a bomb attack.
Baloney
Washington's top military
commander in Iraq immediately dismissed the
reports as "ludicrous".
"That's baloney,"
General George Casey told the Fox News Sunday
television program.
"We've already gone
back and looked at it. Our soldiers who came
on the scene found him being put in an
ambulance by Iraqi police, they took him off,
rendered first aid, and he expired," said
the top brass.
"He died while
American soldiers were attempting to save his
life. So the idea that there were people there
beating him is just ludicrous."
The US military said Sunday
that military doctor have completed an autopsy
on Zarqawi's body.
US military spokesman Major
William Wilhoite said the military was now
"awaiting the findings" of the
medical examination conducted by two doctors
flown in from outside Iraq.
Caldwell said Saturday the
autopsy was being done to see "how he
actually died" after repeated queries
about the conditions of Zarqawi's death.
