Staff Sgt. Robert Bales (L) at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California (file photo)
A military judge has accepted a US soldier’s guilty plea in the massacre of 16 Afghan villagers, ruling that he would not face the death penalty.
“In accordance with your plea of guilty this court martial finds you… guilty of all remaining charges,” judge Colonel Jeffery Nance said on Wednesday.
The judge ordered that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who admitted 16 counts of premeditated murder over the massacre in southern Afghanistan in March 2012, should spend the rest of his life behind bars without eligibility for parole.
Bales pleaded guilty to “horrible” massacre in return for escaping the death penalty.
“I formed the intent to kill and then did kill by shooting with a firearm and burning her,” he read from a statement, which detailed each murder in the same wording, in a military courtroom at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle in the US state of Washington.
Asked why he had killed the villagers, he said, “Sir, as far as why, I’ve asked that question a million times since then. There’s not a good reason in this world for why I did the horrible things I did.”
Bales’ lawyers had reportedly reached a deal with military prosecutors not to seek a death penalty for their client in exchange for his guilty plea.
Following the announcement, the families of the victims voiced their anger, saying that he deserved the death penalty.
The prosecutors sought the death penalty against Bales last November.
Bales had been charged with shooting or stabbing to death the Afghan civilians after walking off a US outpost in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province in the early hours of March 11, 2012.
While the US Army insists that Bales acted alone, an Afghan fact-finding mission has found that the trooper was not the only perpetrator of the crime and that up to 20 US soldiers were involved in the carnage.
DB/MHB
This article originally appeared on: Press TV