Baghdad, January 05: Baghdad is weighing how to best react after a US court dropped charges against American guards accused of killing 14 Iraqi civilians in an unprovoked attack in 2007, a government spokesman said Monday.
Spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said Iraq’s options were limited by the US legal system and a bilateral agreement between Baghdad and Washington.
“The US government is studying two possibilities,” Dabbagh told state-funded Al-Iraqiya television channel.
“The first is to appeal the decision, and the second is to open another case with new evidence and testimony from an Iraqi investigation.”
Dabbagh’s comments refute a statement made just hours earlier by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that Iraq had already filed a lawsuit against Blackwater, which has since renamed itself Xe, in a US court and would soon file another in Iraq.
The US court ruling last week dismissed criminal charges against the Blackwater guards on technical grounds, sparking fury in the war-torn country.
An Iraqi investigation in the aftermath of the September 2007 killings has shown that the five guards were unquestionably responsible for the deaths of the civilians.
Dabbagh added the Iraqi government could also provide help to victims of the violence and their families so that they could file their own civil or criminal case against Blackwater in a US court.
Maliki earlier told reporters in the holy Shiite shrine city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, that Iraq had “formed a committee and filed a case against Blackwater in the United States and will file one here in Iraq.”
Dabbagh said, however, that no case had been filed in the US, and added it would not be possible for one to be tried in an Iraqi court because the incident had occurred before a bilateral security agreement between Washington and Baghdad lifted private security companies’ immunity from prosecution.
The guards, who had been part of a convoy of armoured vehicles, had been charged with killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians and wounding 18 others during the attack at a busy Baghdad roundabout using guns and grenades.
Iraq says 17 people were killed.
US Federal Judge Ricardo Urbina dismissed the charges against the five, saying prosecutors violated their rights by using incriminating statements they had made under immunity during a US State Department probe.
The case was among the most sensational that sought to hold Blackwater employees accountable for what was seen as a culture of lawlessness and lack of accountability in the company’s Iraqi operations.
Blackwater pulled out of Iraq in May, after the US State Department refused to renew its contracts.
—Agencies