The Iraqi government says it will sign a prisoner transfer deal with Britain, under which a former British soldier convicted of murder in Iraq could serve the remaining of his life sentence in the UK.
An Iraqi cabinet statement on Tuesday said the government has given Justice Minister Hassan al-Shammari “the power to negotiate and sign a draft agreement for transferring convicted prisoners between Iraq and Britain.”
The Iraqi Justice Minister and British officials have been discussing the deal since January.
A key beneficiary of the deal would be British security guard Danny Fitzsimons, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by an Iraqi court in February 2011 for shooting two of his colleagues in Baghdad’s Green Zone in August 2009.
Earlier in January, allegations that British troops were guilty of killing Iraqi civilians and performing “terrifying acts of brutality” were also made in London’s High Court.
Lawyers representing 192 Iraqis are asking for a public inquiry into British detention practices following the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, to which Britain was the second largest contributor of troops.
US-led forces attacked Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam Hussein on the pretext of possessing weapons of mass destruction. But no WMD was ever discovered in Iraq. At the peak of the US-led military operation in Iraq, there were 170,000 US troops and more than 500 bases in Iraq.
More than one million Iraqis were killed as the result of the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.
SSM/PKH/HE
