Baghdad: Negotiations to keep US troops in Iraq came under new strain on Friday in the wake of WikiLeaks' release of a UN letter alleging that an Iraqi family was handcuffed and shot in the head in a 2006 raid by American forces, not accidentally killed in an airstrike.
Iraq's government said on Friday it will investigate the new allegations. And some officials said that the document was reason enough for Iraq to force the American military to leave instead of signing a deal allowing troops to stay beyond a year-end departure deadline.
On March 15, 2006, US troops searching for an al Qaeda cell converged on a house in Ishaqi, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Baghdad. The US military said the troops were hit by gunfire from inside the house, and called in an airstrike after a gun battle, destroying the house.
Twelve days later, UN investigator Philip Alston sent a letter to US officials saying autopsies by the morgue at nearby Tikrit Hospital had "revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed." Alston provided no details
about the source of his information.
Images taken by an AP photographer shortly after the raid in Ishaqi showed the bodies of at least two men and three children, none in handcuffs, laid out in blankets outside the house. Footage shot by an AP Television News cameraman at the time showed at least five children dead. At least one adult male and four of the children had deep wounds to the head that could have been caused by bullets or shrapnel. One child had an obvious entry wound to the side. The interiors of the walls left standing were pocked with bullet holes.
The US military investigated the incident and said on June 2, 2006 that, while as many as nine civilians may have been killed, the commander had followed the rules of engagement, and Iraqi allegations that the family was executed
were false.
The issue moved back into the public eye in Iraq and around the world this week as media including McClatchy Newspapers published reports on Alston's cable, which was released by the anti-secrecy website this summer in a trove of
confidential US government documents, many of them classified.
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