Life for US soldier over Iraq girl’s murder

Sunday, September 06, 2009 WASHINGTON: A former US soldier has been sentenced to life in jail for the gang rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the killing of her family members.Steven Dale Green was sentenced on Friday, nearly four months after he was convicted of the rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer al-Janabi and the killing of her mother, father and six-year-old sister in Baghdad in 2006.Judge Thomas Russell called Green's actions "unimaginable, unjustified and inexcusable" and gave him five consecutive life sentences without any eligibility for parole.Green was found to be the leader of a group of five US soldiers who planned the attack over whiskey and a game of cards. Three other soldiers were given life sentences by military courts for the attack. They will eligible for parole in 10 years.A fourth soldier received a 27-month jail sentence for keeping watch while the other soldiers carried out their attack at the Janabi family home.Green was tried in a civilian court after being discharged from the army due to a "personality disorder" before his role in the crime came to light. Green said that his actions were "really messed up and wrong," but he told the prosecution "you still don't know what happened. You weren't there.""All I ever did was what they told me to do," Green said, adding that former Specialist Paul Cortez, the group's ranking soldier, "ordered all of this." "You all can act like I am a psychopath or a sexual predator or whatever," Green said. "But if I had never gone to Iraq I would never have got caught up in anything like this." Green's lawyers had argued that he should have been sent home from Iraq after he complained on several occasions that he was under stress and had a desire to kill Iraqi civilians.But prosecutors said that Green was responsible for "a planned, premeditated crime which was carried out in cold blood." During the trial, Cortez and another soldier said that the group put on black clothing and masks to look like insurgents, before heading to the house of a girl they had spotted.They told the court that Green took Janabi's parents and sister into another room and shot them dead as two of the other soldiers in the group raped her. Green raped the 14-year-old girl before shooting her dead. The soldiers then set alight a kerosene-soaked blanket that they had placed on Janabi’s body.

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India's swine flu death rate is increasing

Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in...

Suicide bombings kill 18 in Iraq

Thursday, August 13, 2009 MOSUL: At least 18 people, most of them members of the ancient Yazidi religious sect, were killed when two suicide bombers blew themselves up on Thursday in a packed cafe in northern Iraq, a local government official said.At least 31 people were also wounded after the bombers detonated suicide belts packed with explosives in the cafe in Kalaa town, in the district of Sanjar, local district chief Dakheel Qassem Hasoon, told a foreign news agency."Two suicide bombers entered the Cafe Barbaroz at 4:30 pm (1330 GMT) and blew themselves up, killing 18 civilians and wounding 31. Most of the victims were Yazidis," Hasoon said.Kalaa, northwest of the insurgent stronghold of Mosul in northern Nineveh province is predominantly populated by the minority Yazidi religious sect, as well as Arabs and Kurds.The attack is the deadliest since Monday, when 51 people were killed across Iraq, including 28 members of the tiny Shabak sect cut down when two truck bombs det...

US drones to target Taliban in Afghan war

Friday, July 31, 2009 WASHINGTON: The US military plans to use more drone aircraft to target Taliban militants in Afghanistan while focusing less on hunting down Al-Qaeda figures, report said on Thursday.Although defeating the Al-Qaeda terror network remains an overriding goal for Washington, officials now believe the best way to pursue that objective is to ensure stability in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan instead of Al-Qaeda manhunts, the paper said, citing US government and Defense Department officials.It was more important to prevent a slide towards violence and anarchy that could be exploited by Al-Qaeda, which used Afghanistan to stage its attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the officials said."We might still be too focused on Bin Laden," an official said. "We should probably reassess our priorities."The shift in priorities for the drone fleet comes despite President Barack Obama's declaration that defeating and dismantling Al-Qaeda ...

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