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Iraqi convicted for murder of three soldiers

Three Iraqis on trial in the gruesome murders of three 101st Airborne Division soldiers in June 2006 claimed in court to be “simple farmers” and told the judicial panel they were bewildered at the accusation.

Less than three hours after proceedings began, however, one of the defendants was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging, and the other two, although acquitted of the crime, remained in Iraqi custody on charges for other offenses.

The trial marked the first time since U.S. troops crossed the berm into Iraq in March 2003 that a case specifically dealing with the deaths of Americans was brought before an Iraqi court.

The evidence presented in the Oct. 28 trial at the Central Criminal Court in Baghdad’s Rusafa Complex was collected by Iraqi investigative judge Hussein Salem Mahmoud with the assistance of military lawyers and forensics experts in the U.S.-led Law and Order Task Force.

A three-judge trial panel handed down the verdicts.

“It’s significant,” said task force director Col. Rafael Lara, who provided details of the investigation and courtroom proceedings in an Oct. 30 phone interview from Baghdad.

An independent Iraqi judiciary made this decision on its own — it was all Iraqi. The only Americans in the courtroom were observers and not participants. It was an open, fair and transparent trial,” he said.

Also significant, he said, was the use in court of forensic evidence corroborated and verified by Iraqi fingerprint experts.

“The Iraqi system uses confessions and witness statements as the basis for convictions. The use of forensic evidence is kind of new to the Iraqi courts,” Lara said.

The man convicted and sentenced to death for the deaths of the three soldiers is Ibrahim al-Qaraghuli, 29, whose case goes into automatic appeal at the Court of Cessation, which is similar to the U.S. Supreme Court in that it doesn’t hear witness testimony and is under no deadline to act swiftly.

His co-defendants were identified as Walid al-Kartani and Kazim al-Zubaie.

Ambush near Baghdad

The ambush, abduction and killings of the soldiers was the most bald-faced attack — and the first of its kind — to occur against U.S. troops in Iraq.

The soldiers, Spc. David J. Babineau, 25, of Springfield, Mass.; Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, Texas; and Pfc. Thomas Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore., were members of B Company, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment.

The junior enlisted soldiers were ambushed June 16, 2006, about 12 miles southwest of Baghdad as they sat on watch duty in a lone Humvee.

The site of the ambush was a canal checkpoint at an armored vehicle launched bridge, a heavy-duty, temporary bridge that unfolds hydraulically from a tracked vehicle on the shoreline.

It was close to 8 p.m. and the soldiers, who were in radio contact but had no reinforcements in visual range, were overwhelmed with small-arms fire and rockets.

Soldiers manning another checkpoint in two Humvees near a river bridge heard the explosions and tried unsuccessfully to make radio contact before dispatching a quick-reaction force that arrived at the canal bridge about 15 minutes later.

Babineau’s body was found at the scene, but Menchaca and Tucker were missing.

After a three-day air, river and ground search by more than 8,000 troops, their mutilated, tied and booby-trapped bodies were found about 7 miles from the attack site in a roadside ditch.

The roads leading to their remains were lined with improvised explosive devices that had to be disabled. The remains were recovered near dawn.

In July 2006, the Mujaheddin al-Shura Council, an al-Qaida-linked group, posted a video on the Internet showing the soldiers’ disfigured bodies, which had been dragged behind a pick-up truck.

A Web statement allegedly posted by al-Qaida in Iraq about the same time claimed responsibility for the killings.

In May 2007, the soldiers’ company commander and platoon leader were relieved of command in administrative actions following an Army investigation of the incident.

The report concluded the event was caused by numerous acts of complacency, and a lack of standards at the platoon level.

Two of the three defendants who appeared in Iraqi court Oct. 28 had been arrested shortly after the attack in an area sweep. The third defendant was arrested a year later.

U.S. military officials have said that several other suspected al-Qaida in Iraq members participated in the ambush, but the U.S.-led investigation failed to yield enough evidence against additional suspects.

Civil law

The Iraqi criminal justice system is a civil law system in which the investigative judge, acting much like a prosecutor in a common law system like that in the U.S., collects evidence and witness statements and directs the investigation.

“Once the investigative judge thinks there’s enough evidence there, he sends it up to a trial panel, a three-judge court,” Lara said, explaining that the panel then must hold a hearing no sooner than eight days and no more than 30 days after the case is presented.

In this instance, the case was presented Sept. 28 and the panel set Oct. 15 for the trial. But the defense asked for a delay, Lara said, because they deemed the case extraordinary in its complexity and needed more time to read the file.

At the crime scene, U.S. authorities did the initial evidence collection and Lara’s team provided that evidence to the Iraqi judge, who used it as part of his basis for the referral of the case.

The rest of the case was built on statements from Iraqi witnesses, the local villagers and people who said they saw the events take place.

In the Oct. 28 trial, the fingerprints collected from the pickup truck, which was later found abandoned, became a point of contention.

“The defense essentially said ‘there’s no smoking gun in the statements,’” Lara said, recalling that the public defender maintained no one could actually say they saw any of the defendants kill or shoot the soldiers.

“They were making a case for conflict of interest by saying ‘You can’t trust the evidence provided by the Americans ... because they’re the victims and they’re providing the evidence,’” he said.

At this juncture, the panel called in the U.S.-trained Iraqi fingerprint experts.

“They got up and swore on the Quran that they had verified the evidence that the fingerprints matched the defendant who ultimately was convicted,” Lara said.

At the trial, the three defendants denied knowing each other and “said they were just simple farmers and had no idea why they were in court,” Lara said.

The bloody fingerprints found inside the pickup truck used to drag the bodies were made in the blood of one of the victims, he said.

“The defendant [who was convicted] had put his hand on the butt of the soldier then put his hand on the pickup truck and that left a fingerprint,” Lara said.

Autopsy pictures were part of the file, although Lara said he has not seen them.

Attempts to reach the soldiers’ families were unsuccessful. Lara said they have been kept informed since the attack on developments in the case and were told of the verdict as soon as it was read.

“Let him pay for what he did,” Maria Guadalupe Vasquez, Menchaca’s mother, who lives in Brownsville, Texas, said in a Brownsville Herald report. “Que se haga justicia para mi hijo,” she said in Spanish — “let justice be done for my son.”

Law and Order Task Force

The Law and Order Task Force, a combination of attorneys and investigators from the Army, Navy and Air Force, also includes Australian and British forensic experts to help train the Iraqis.

The team is tasked with increasing Iraqi judicial capacity through the mentorship of judges and by helping the Iraqis wade through their criminal investigations with a fresh eye, eschewing practices used under dictator Saddam Hussein.

Lara recalled an anecdote relayed to him by an Iraqi judge in which a man was hauled in, tortured and put on trial because he had committed a crime in a dream recounted by another man.

The dreamer, the judge said, “didn’t mention anyone else,” so he had no choice but to try the accused man.

Changing the way business is done also will include an effort to modernize the record-keeping system, which is done completely in long-hand on paper.

The Iraqi criminal justice system’s demanding case load would not typically focus on investigating cases such as the one of the three soldiers.

That case originally was under investigation by Task Force 134, which has responsibility for detainee operations for Multi-National Force-Iraq but got sent to the Law and Order Task Force, where there is closer liaison with Iraqi judges and investigators.

But some cases involving the deaths of U.S. personnel are in the investigatory pipeline.

One surrounds the June 24 explosion of a hidden bomb at a meeting inside an eastern Baghdad municipal building.

The attack killed 11 people, including two U.S. soldiers, two American civilians working for the Defense and State departments, an Italian national working for the Defense Department, and six Iraqis.

The task force, Lara said, is helping the Iraqis sift through and catalog the forensic evidence on how the bombs were built and detonated and what kinds of explosives were used, but the focus is not on the deaths of U.S. personnel.

“If it does come to court, it will include the fact that the bomb killed Americans,” he said.

Another such case took place June 26 in an attack 30 miles west of Baghdad that killed three Marines, two Iraqi interpreters, the local mayor and several key tribal figures.

A suicide bomber dressed in a police uniform detonated an explosive belt during a meeting of tribal sheiks opposed to al-Qaida in Iraq.

“They’re also investigating other cases against bomb makers in attacks that may have killed Americans or coalition forces — all the terrorist crimes,” Lara said.

The goal of the task force is get the Iraqis back to a system of judicial independence.

“There’s nothing wrong with the civil system; we just want them to get away from the way it used to be under Saddam,” he said.