Four former contractors with a notorious US private security firm, formerly known as Blackwater, are facing new charges over a deadly 2007 shooting which left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.
On September 16, 2007, Blackwater guards, who were hired to guard US diplomats, opened fire on the streets of Baghdad and killed 17 civilians including women and children.
According to prosecutors, the heavily-armed Blackwater guards carried out an unprovoked attack, using heavy machine guns and grenades, which also wounded at least 20 other people.
Washington rejected Iraqi officials’ demands that the US guards face trial in Iraq.
One year after the deadly attack in Baghdad, the guards were charged with manslaughter and weapons violations.
However, in 2009, a federal trial judge in Washington, Ricardo Urbina, threw out the case saying the US Department of Justice withheld evidence from a grand jury and violated the guards’ constitutional rights.
Urbina’s dismissal of the case outraged the Iraqi people.
In 2011, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals reinstated the case, ruling Urbina had wrongly interpreted the law.
Four Blackwater guards have been charged with counts of voluntary manslaughter and of attempting to commit manslaughter.
Initially, US prosecutors charged five guards with counts of manslaughter and took a guilty plea from a sixth. However, last month, they dismissed their case against the fifth guard, Donald Ball, and the sixth, Jeremy Ridgeway, is awaiting sentencing.
Blackwater is currently called Academi, and is based in the US state of Virginia.
Generally, the US is slow to convict its troops or US-based security contractors of war crimes and when a punishment is imposed for such crimes, it usually takes the form of life in prison or house arrest.
In August, a US soldier who murdered 16 Afghan civilians in a shooting spree last year, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, was sentenced to life in prison.
Meanwhile, Washington is insisting that any US troops left in Afghanistan after the 2014 withdrawal of foreign forces from the country must enjoy legal immunity from Afghan courts.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Thursday that US troops must remain under Washington’s jurisdiction, and it is the US courts where American troops would stand trial.
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