Two US Marines suspected of killing family members in infamous Iraq war shooting, experts tell BBC

“This is the room where my whole family was killed,” Safa Younis said.

She grew up in the Iraqi town of Haditha, in a house with a front door pockmarked with bullet holes. In the back bedroom, a colorful bedspread covers the bed where her family was shot.

She was hiding here with her five siblings, her mother and her aunt when U.S. Marines stormed their home and opened fire on Nov. 19, 2005, killing everyone but Safa. Her father was also shot as he opened the front door.

Today, 20 years later, a BBC Eye investigation has uncovered evidence implicating two marines who were never tried in the killings of the Safa family, forensic experts say.

The evidence – mostly statements and testimony given after the killings – has raised doubts about the U.S. investigation into the events that day and raised major questions about how U.S. armed forces will be held accountable.

The killings of Safa’s family were part of the Haditha massacre, in which U.S. Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians, including four women and six children. They entered three houses and killed almost everyone inside, as well as a driver and four students in a car on their way to college.

The incident sparked the longest U.S. war crimes investigation into the Iraq war, but no one was found guilty of the killing.

The Marines said they were responding to gunfire after a roadside bomb exploded, killing one member and injuring two others.

But Safa, who was 13 at the time, told News International: “We were not charged with anything. We didn’t even have any weapons in the house.”

She survived by pretending to be dead among the tiny bodies of her sister and brother – the youngest was just three years old. “I’m the only survivor in my entire family,” she said.

Four Marines were initially charged with murder, but they gave conflicting accounts of events, and over time U.S. military prosecutors dropped the charges against three of them, sparing them further legal action.

That left squad leader Staff Sergeant Frank Utrich the only person to stand trial in 2012.

In a never-before-aired video of a pretrial hearing, Private First Class Humberto Mendoza, the most junior member of the squad, is questioned and reconstructs what happened at Safa’s home.

Mendoza, a private at the time and never charged, admitted to killing Safa’s father as he opened the front door for the Marine.

“Did you see his hands?” a lawyer asked him. “Yes, sir,” Mendoza replied, going on to confirm that Safa’s father was not armed. “But you shot him anyway?” the lawyer asked. “Yes, sir,” Mendoza said.

Mendoza initially claimed in his official statement that after entering the house, he opened the door to the bedroom where Safa and his family were located, but when he saw only women and children inside, he closed the door instead of entering.

However, in newly discovered audio recordings of Wutrich’s trial, Mendoza gave a different account. He said he walked about 8 feet (2.4 m) into the bedroom.

Forensic expert Michael Maloney said this was very important. In 2006, Naval Criminal Investigative Service sent him to Haditha to investigate the killings, and he inspected the bedroom where Safa’s family was shot.

Based on crime scene photos taken by Marines at the time of the killings, he concluded that two Marines entered the room and shot the women and children.

“It’s amazing to me,” Maloney said, when we played him a recording of Mendoza saying he walked into the room. “We’re listening to stuff that I’ve never heard before today.”

He said that showed Mendoza positioned himself where Maloney concluded the first shooter was standing, at the foot of the bed.

“If you ask me: ‘Is this some kind of confession?’ I would say: ‘Mendoza admitted to everything except pulling the trigger.'”

Safa gave video testimony to military prosecutors in 2006, but it was never played in court. In it, she described how a Marine who opened her bedroom door threw a grenade, but it didn’t explode, and then the same man walked into the room and shot her family members. Mendoza is the only Marine who has ever said he opened the door.

Another Marine, Chief Warrant Officer Stephen Tatum, did not deny his involvement in the shooting but said he followed Utrich, the squad leader, into the bedroom and initially claimed he was unaware women and children were there because of poor visibility.

But in three statements later obtained by the BBC, Tatum gave a different account.

“I saw kids kneeling in the room. I don’t remember the exact number, just that it was a lot. I was trained to shoot two to the chest, two to the head, and I followed that training,” Tatum told Naval Criminal Investigative Service in April 2006.

A month later, he said he “was able to determine that the people in the room were women and children before he opened fire.”

A week later, he said: “This is where I saw the child I shot. Knowing it was a child, I shot him anyway.” He described the child as wearing a white T-shirt, standing on the bed and with short hair.

Tatum’s defense attorneys claimed these later statements were obtained under duress. In March 2008, the charges against Tatum were dropped, and Uttridge’s trial ignored these statements.

Forensic expert Michael Maloney said statements from Mendoza and Tatum identified them as the two Marines who shot Safa’s family. He believes Mendoza entered the bedroom first and Tatum then “shot the head of the bed.”

We filed charges against Mendoza and Tatum. Mendoza did not respond. He previously admitted to shooting Safa’s father but said he was following orders. He was never charged with a criminal offense.

Tatum has said through his attorney that he wants to put Haditha behind him. He never retracted his testimony that he was one of the gunmen in Safa’s home.

Maloney told the BBC that prosecutors “wanted Wooltridge to be the main shooter”. But before Maloney could testify, Wutrich’s trial ended with a plea deal.

Utrich insisted he had no memory of what happened at Safa’s home and agreed to plead guilty to one count of negligent dereliction of duty, a charge unrelated to any direct involvement in the killings.

Uttrich’s military attorney, former Marine Haitham Faraj, said the penalty was “nothing less than a slap in the face … like a speeding ticket.”

Neil Puckett, Uttridge’s lead defense attorney, said the entire investigation and prosecution against his client was “botched.”

“Prosecutors granted immunity to all witnesses and dismissed all charges … essentially preventing them from achieving justice in this case,” he said.

Haytham Faraj also admitted that the process was deeply flawed.

He told the BBC: “The government pays people to come in and lie, and with the payment comes immunity, and that’s how they abuse the legal process.”

“Haditha’s trial was never about giving a voice to the victims,” ​​he added.

He said survivors had “the correct impression of a show trial with no real outcome and no one being punished”.

The Marine Corps tells us it is committed to fair and open proceedings and due process of law in accordance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It added that the investigation would not be reopened unless substantial new, unexamined and admissible evidence was presented.

The lead prosecutor in the case did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Safa, now 33, still lives in Haditha and has three children. She said she couldn’t understand why no Marines were punished for her family’s deaths.

When we showed her the video of Mendoza, she said he “should have been incarcerated from the moment the incident occurred and it should be impossible for him to see the light of day.”

“It’s like what happened last year. I still think about it,” she said of the day her family was killed.

“I hope those who did this are held accountable and punished by the law. They have not been tried for almost 20 years. This is a real crime.”

Additional reporting by Namak Khoshnaw and Michael Epstein