US soldier who raped and murdered Iraqi girl, 14, may face death
James Hider, Middle East Correspondent
A former American soldier has been convicted of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl before murdering her and her family, and may face the death sentence for his crimes.
Relatives of Abeer al-Janabi, who attracted the fatal attention of Private First Class Steven Green and his comrades as they manned a traffic checkpoint in the so-called triangle of death south of Baghdad, said that the 24-year-old soldier must die.
“We are just waiting for the court to sentence him so he gets justice and the court can change the image of Americans,” Karim Janabi, the uncle of the girl, said.
Green, who was dismissed from the army with a personality disorder before the rape and murder charges came to light, was charged in a civilian court in Kentucky with premeditated murder, rape and obstruction of justice. His lawyer argued that the brutality of life in the combat zone, as well as a lack of leadership, had turned his client into a killer. However, the jury took less than two days to return a guilty verdict.
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Green and three other soldiers manning Traffic Checkpoint 2 in the lawless town of Mahmoudiya — notorious for its al-Qaeda-linked killings — spotted the teenage girl as she passed by their checkpoint in March 2006. Drinking whiskey and playing cards, as Iraq sunk deeper into sectarian civil war, the young soldiers hatched a plot to track her home dressed in black ninja-style clothes.
In the house three of Green’s comrades took turns raping the girl while he led her parents and six-year-old sister into a room next door. According to testimony from an earlier military tribunal, there were shots before Green walked back into the room where his comrades were gang-raping the girl. “They’re all dead. I just killed them,” he said. He then raped Miss al-Janabi before putting a pillow over her face and shooting her three times with an AK47 rifle.
Shortly afterwards, a hardline Sunni group ambushed an American patrol from the same unit, kidnapping two soldiers, who were tortured and beheaded in what the militants later said was revenge for the rape and murder. The bodies of the two soldiers were left booby-trapped to explode.
The case came to light when another soldier from the same platoon reported the atrocity in a psychological counselling session to help him to deal with the deaths of the two American soldiers who were beheaded by the militants.
The three other soldiers who raped Ms al-Janabi have already been given life sentences in a military court. Green’s sentencing hearing will begin on Monday.

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