Blackwater guards found guilty over deaths of 14 Iraqis

Guilty verdicts were returned Wednesday for all four former Blackwater security guards charged in the 2007 shootings of more than 30 Iraqis in Baghdad.

A federal jury in Washington D.C. found Nicholas Slatten guilty of first-degree murder. The three other three guards — Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard —were found guilty of voluntary manslaughter. The four men were charged with a combined 33 counts in relation to the shootings.

The Sept. 16, 2007 shootings triggered an international uproar over the role of defense contractors in urban warfare. The incident also outraged Iraqis and stoked anti-American sentiment around the world.

Blackwater had been hired by the State Department to protect U.S. diplomats in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. Blackwater convoys of four heavily armored vehicles operated in risky environments where car bombs and attacks by insurgents were commonplace.

The jury had reached verdicts on only part of the charges, but Judge Royce Lamberth allowed them to announce the verdicts on Wednesday that they had reached. The jury is expected to continue deliberating on the other counts. In all, the jury found the four former guards guilty on nearly every charge related to the incident.

The case had been mired in legal battles for years, making it uncertain at one point if the defendants would ever be tried. The trial focused on the killings of 14 Iraqis and the wounding of 17 others. During an 11-week trial, prosecutors summoned 72 witnesses — including Iraqi victims, their families and former colleagues of the Blackwater guards.

There was sharp disagreement over the facts in the case. The defendants' lawyers said there was strong evidence that the guards were targeted with incoming gunfire from insurgents and Iraqi police, prompting the guards to return fire in self-defense. Federal prosecutors said there was no incoming gunfire and that the shootings were unprovoked.

The prosecution focused on the defendants' intent, declaring that some of the Blackwater guards harbored a low regard and deep hostility toward the Iraqi civilian population. The guards, the prosecution said, held "a grave indifference" to the death and injury their actions would likely cause Iraqis. Several former Blackwater guards testified that they too had been distrustful of Iraqis generally, based on ambushes the guards had experienced.

Prosecutors said that from a vantage point inside his convoy's command vehicle, Slatten aimed his SR-25 sniper rifle through a gun portal, killing the driver of a stopped white Kia sedan, Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia'y.

At the trial, two Iraqi traffic officers and one of the surviving victims testified the car was stopped at the time the shots were fired. The assertion that the car was motionless supported the prosecution argument that the shots were unwarranted.

Defense lawyers pressed their argument that other Blackwater guards — not Slatten— fired the first shots at the Kia sedan and that they did so only after the vehicle moved slowly toward the convoy, posing what appeared to be a threat to the Blackwater guards' safety.

Once the shooting started, hundreds of Iraqi citizens ran for their lives.

It was "gunfire coming from the left, gunfire coming from the right," prosecutor Anthony Asuncion told the jury in closing arguments.  

One of the government witnesses in the case, Blackwater guard Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty to killing the driver's mother, who died in the passenger seat of the white Kia next to her son.

The maximum sentence for conviction of first-degree murder is life imprisonment. The gun charges carry mandatory minimum prison terms of 30 years. The maximum prison term for involuntary manslaughter is eight years; and for attempted manslaughter it is seven years.

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