Baghdad, January 24: The United States will appeal a court decision dismissing manslaughter charges against five Blackwater Worldwide guards involved in a deadly 2007 Baghdad shooting, US Vice President Joe Biden said Saturday.
Biden’s announcement after a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani shows just how diplomatically sensitive the incident remains nearly three years later. A lawyer for one guard, noting that word of the intended appeal came in Iraq, accused the Obama administration of political expediency and said the US was pursuing an innocent man, rather than justice.
Blackwater security contractors were guarding US diplomats when the guards opened fire in Nisoor Square, a crowded Baghdad intersection, on Sept. 16, 2007. Seventeen people were killed, including women and children, in a shooting that inflamed anti-American sentiment in Iraq.
Biden expressed his “personal regret” for the shooting and said the Obama administration was disappointed by the dismissal. “A dismissal is not an acquittal,” Biden said.
Washington rebuffed Iraqi demands that the American contractors face trial in Iraqi courts. After a lengthy investigation, US prosecutors charged five of the contractors with manslaughter and took a guilty plea from a sixth.
But the case fell apart when a federal trial judge in Washington, Ricardo Urbina, said in a Dec. 31 ruling that the Justice Department mishandled evidence and violated the guards’ constitutional rights. Prosecutors now face difficult odds getting an appeals court to reinstate the case.
The dismissal outraged many Iraqis, who said it showed the Americans considered themselves above the law. The Iraqi government began collecting signatures for a class-action lawsuit from victims who were wounded or lost relatives.
Meanwhile, the US Marine Corps wrapped up nearly seven years in Iraq on Saturday, handing over duties to the US Army and signaling the beginning of an accelerated withdrawal of American troops.
The Marines formally handed over control of Anbar, Iraq’s largest province, to the army during a ceremony at a base in Ramadi, where some of the fiercest fighting of the war took place.
In Baghdad, Biden earlier held talks with Iraqi leaders amid rising tensions over plans to ban election candidates because of suspected links to Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The White House worries the ban could raise questions over the fairness of the March 7 parliamentary elections, which are seen as an important step in the American pullout timetable and breaking political stalemates over key issues such as dividing Iraq’s oil revenue.
——-Agencies