Newsweek: Death From All Sides

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Death From All Sides
Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2007-10-01 19:53. Evidence

By Kevin Peraino, Newsweek

An extensive evidence file assembled by the Iraqi National Police after the controversial Blackwater shooting suggests that the private contractors opened fire unprovoked from the ground and the sky.

Since the fatal Sept. 16 Blackwater USA shooting in Baghdad's Nasoor Square, officials from the private security company have insisted that their guards were responding to fire from "armed enemies." Yet an extensive evidence file put together by the Iraqi National Police and obtained by NEWSWEEK - including documents, maps, sworn witness statements and police video footage - appears to contradict the contractors' version of events. A confidential incident report, which has been provided by Iraqi National Police investigators to American military and civilian officials, concludes that the Blackwater vehicles "opened fire crazily and randomly, without any reason."

A nine-minute police video made in the moments after the shooting shows helicopters similar to those used by Blackwater still hovering over the wreckage of charred, smoking and bullet-pocked cars. (For an edited clip of the video, click here.) The graphic images include footage of burned human remains and show the street littered with brass bullet casings. They also show what appears to be a police officer waving a pistol at the scene; the footage was captured by a different police officer, who had run over from the nearby Iraqi National Police headquarters. (Portions of the video have been previously broadcast; it was recorded without sound.)

Iraqi National Police investigators also believe that Blackwater's helicopters fired on the cars from above, according to confidential police documents and interviews with senior police officials. A memo written on Sept. 17 by the lead Iraqi police investigator states that shortly after the shooting began, "helicopters opened fire from the air toward the cars and civilians." Gen. Hussein al-Awadi, the commander of the Iraqi National Police, told NEWSWEEK that the trajectory of some of the bullet wounds could only have been caused by fire from the air. "If anyone moved - whenever they saw someone leaving - either the convoy or the chopper shot him," says Ali Kalaf Salman, an undercover Iraqi National Police officer who was working as a traffic cop at the scene. (One of the police documents lists 17 fatalities and many more wounded from the shooting. Other accounts have put the death toll at 11.)

Blackwater officials have acknowledged that their helicopters were at the scene of the shooting, but have denied that the guards in the choppers opened fire. In statements from Blackwater guards provided to the U.S. State Department and obtained by ABC News, the guards say they were fired upon by uniformed Iraqi police officers and others dressed in civilian clothes from multiple locations near the traffic circle. Still images provided to the network show a Blackwater vehicle pocked with five bullet marks. Anne Tyrrell, a company spokesperson, said shortly after the incident that the company "acted lawfully and appropriately in response to a hostile attack in Baghdad ... The 'civilians' reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies and Blackwater personnel returned defensive fire."

Yet Iraqi policemen and other Iraqi witnesses told NEWSWEEK that the Blackwater contractors opened fire unprovoked. "No one shot at Blackwater," says Col. Faris Saadi Abdul, the lead Iraqi police investigator. "Blackwater shot without any cause." Al-Awadi, the National Police commander, says that minutes after he heard the shooting begin, he rushed to the scene, which is just around the corner from the National Police headquarters. (He says he was accompanied by a unit of American military trainers embedded with his police.) "We were trying to figure out why they were shooting," he told a NEWSWEEK reporter at the National Police headquarters in Baghdad over the weekend. "We tried to find a reason and we couldn't." He says that his men searched the civilian cars at the scene, but didn't find any weapons. When Iraqi investigators later stopped a different Blackwater convoy near the scene of the shooting, the general says that the Blackwater guards refused to comment about the incident.

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