The New Nam

U.S. soldiers execute 16 year old boy

Two U.S. Army soldiers face murder charges in a military trial in Baghdad for shooting and killing a badly wounded Iraqi teenager mistaken for an insurgent by U.S. troops, the Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday on its Web site.

The newspaper quoted the two Army staff sergeants as saying they shot and killed the Iraqi boy in a "mercy killing" as he lay moaning on the ground in an August incident in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City.

The two soldiers told U.S. officials that they killed the teenager in order to "put him out of his misery," the newspaper said.

But Iraqi witnesses, including a relative of the dead boy who had pleaded for U.S. troops to help him, were enraged by the killing, which seemed certain to reignite a debate about the conduct of U.S. troops in Iraq in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.

The boy was shot as U.S. medics rushed to treat a half dozen or so of those wounded when U.S. troops opened fire on a garbage truck after mistakenly concluding that it was planting roadside bombs, the newspaper said, quoting Iraqi witnesses and U.S. military officials.


are these the morals conservatives voted for?

No comments: