Twelve years after a massacre of Iraqi civilians, a US court sentenced a former mercenary from the security firm Blackwater to life imprisonment for the second time. The sentence against the former employee of the US company was announced yesterday (local time) in Washington. Back in December, a jury convicted Nicholas Slatten of having shot a young Iraqi.
Shot in quantity without a choice
Several Blackwater employees fired random assault rifles, machine guns, and grenade launchers into a crowd on September 16, 2007, on bustling Nisur Square in the Iraqi capital Baghdad. The mercenaries should have protected a diplomatic convoy. According to a US investigation, within a quarter of an hour 14 civilians were killed, and Iraqi investigators are talking about more deaths.
Slatten was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 2014. The verdict was lifted in 2017 but. In a renewed process, the jury 2018 could not agree on a unanimous verdict. A guilty verdict then took place in the third trial.
In 2014, three other ex-Blackwater mercenaries were separately sentenced to 30 years in prison for their involvement in the massacre. These procedures also had to be reopened. The mercenaries relied on self-defense. By their own admission, they had taken the driver of an approaching car as a suicide bomber.
