US: A criminal investigation into the deaths of 24 Iraqis in the town of Haditha last year is close to completion and will support allegations that they were executed by a group of US marines, it has been reported.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which is investigating last November's killings in Haditha, was not allowed to exhume bodies but it interviewed survivors and members of the marine company involved.
A spokesman said a statement was being prepared, but US reports last night quoted Pentagon officials as saying that the provisional report backed claims that the Iraqi victims in Haditha had not been caught in the crossfire but had been shot deliberately.
The official report claimed that a marine detachment was hit by a roadside bomb, which killed one US serviceman and 15 civilian bystanders. Local residents claimed the civilians had been gunned down in cold blood, with women and children among those rounded up in the room of a nearby house and murdered.
A separate investigation into the possibility of a cover-up by senior officers has already been delivered to the Pentagon but has not yet been published. According to leaks, it found no evidence of a conspiracy to hide the facts, but it did find that officers failed to scrutinise inconsistencies in the official reports by the marines involved.
The incident has the potential to become to the Iraq war what the My Lai incident was to Vietnam - a US massacre that severely damages the prestige of US forces and undermines support for the war at home.
Lawyers for one of the marines under investigation, Staff Sgt Frank Wuterich, yesterday sued Democratic Congressman John Murtha for declaring in May that innocent Iraqis had been killed "in cold blood".
The lawsuit claimed that Pentagon officials "who have briefed or leaked information to Mr Murtha deliberately provided him with inaccurate and false information" and that the congressman subsequently "has made repeated statements . . . that are defamatory" to Staff Sgt Wuterich and his fellow marines. -