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player ready...The Iraqi government expects to refer criminal charges to the Iraqi courts within days in a shooting here by the American security company Blackwater USA, the state minister for national security affairs said Saturday.
Shirwan al-Waili said the Iraqi probe of the incident in western Baghdad’s Nisoor Square, in which 11 Iraqis were killed, was largely completed and that he believed the findings were definitive.
“The shots fired on the Iraqis were unjustifiable,” he said. “It was harsh and horrible.”
An Interior Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, told The Associated Press that evidence accumulated in the inquiry included a videotape shot by cameras at the nearby headquarters of the national police command.
Blackwater, in its only statement so far on the shooting, has said its employees were responding to an ambush.
There also were reports that Blackwater was facing a possible federal investigation in the U.S. into whether the company shipped unlicensed automatic weapons and military goods to Iraq. The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., reported that two former Blackwater employees had pleaded guilty to weapons charges in the state, where the company is based, and were cooperating with federal officials in the broader investigation.
In a statement Saturday, Blackwater denied any wrongdoing.
Iraqi government officials have indicated they are looking into earlier shootings involving Blackwater. “The American Blackwater company has made for the seventh time the same mistake against the Iraqis and in different places in Baghdad,” according to a preliminary report from the Iraqi investigation obtained by The New York Times.
Al-Waili indicated that despite announcements that Iraqi and U.S. investigators would be working together, Iraqi investigators had so far received little or no information from their U.S. counterparts and had gotten no access to the Blackwater guards involved.
In other developments, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani expressed anger at the detention of a man he said was an Iranian diplomat, Agai Mahummdi Firhadi, who was arrested by the U.S. military Thursday in northern Iraq for allegedly smuggling explosives. The president’s office said Talabani had “sent a message of anger” to U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and the U.S. military commander, Gen. David Petraeus.
Also Saturday, the U.S. military announced the death of two U.S. soldiers — one of an unspecified non-combat-related injury and another in a vehicle accident in Diyala province. At least 3,795 U.S. military personnel have died in the war, according to an AP count.