Iraq's UN Envoy accuses U.S. Marines of 'cold blooded murder'

There are no reviewed versions of this page, so it may not have been checked for adherence to standards.

Monday, July 4, 2005

Mohamed al-Sumaidaie, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, accused U.S. marines of murdering his cousin's 21-year-old son, Mohammed Sumaidaie, who was studying engineering at the University of Technology in Baghdad. “All indications point to a killing of an unarmed innocent civilian - a cold-blooded murder,” said Sumaidaie. “The Marines were smiling at each other as they were leaving.”

Sumaidaie called for an investigation of the alleged June 25 killing of the student while the US military said the charges “roughly correspond to an incident involving coalition forces on that day in that general location.” U.S.-led forces were conducting a sweep in the western portion of Anbar, in the province of Sumaidaie's ancestral villiage.

Sumaidaie said the “Americans come and rough up the youths in the village demanding information which they simply do not have,”

The alleged victim was at his father’s house with his mother when marines knocked at the door the ambassador said, quoting the young man's mother. According to Sumaidaie's letter, the Marines asked if there were any weapons, and Mohammed said there was a rifle, which only had blanks. He then led some of the Marines into his father's bedroom where it was kept. The younger brother of the dead student was dragged by his hair into a corridor and beaten while the rest of the family was told to wait outside, he said.

After waiting for more than an hour on the porch, the marines left, and the victim's mother found her son dead with a bullet to the neck, according to Sumaidaie.

"The mother let off a deafening cry of anguish but the marines were smiling at each other as they were leaving," Sumaidaie said. "In the bedroom, Mohamed was found dead and laying in a clotted pool of his blood."

U.S. Maj. Gen. Stephen T. Johnson said, "We take these allegations seriously and will thoroughly investigate this incident to determine what happened."

Sources

Edith M. Lederer. "U.S. Marines Accused of Killing Iraq Man" — Associated Press, July 2, 2005
Gulf Times. "Marines murdered my cousin: Iraq UN envoy" — Gulf Times, July 3, 2005
Times Staff. "At Least 12 Killed in Suicide Attack on Baghdad Police Station" — LATimes, July 2, 2005

Share this:

The text of this article has been released into the public domain. In the event that this is not legally possible, this article may be used for any purpose, without any condition, unless such conditions are required by law. This applies worldwide. Copyright terms on images, however, may vary, so please check individual image pages prior to duplication.
Please note that this only applies to Wikinews content created prior to September 25, 2005. All content created after that date is released under a Creative Commons license which is mentioned at the bottom of each article. This is currently the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.