Haditha Marine Frank Wuterich enters guilty plea

Sgt Frank Wuterich faced nine counts of manslaughter

 

The final US Marine to face charges over the killing of unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005 has pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty.

Sgt Frank Wuterich was one of eight Marines originally charged with murder or failure to investigate the killings.
The charges against six of them were dropped or dismissed, and one was acquitted.
Sgt Wuterich reached a plea deal to bring an end to the most notorious case against US troops from the Iraq war.
He faces a maximum of three months confinement, two-thirds forfeiture of pay and a rank demotion to private.
Before the plea, he faced several counts of manslaughter.
He is expected to be sentenced on Tuesday.
War's legacy Sgt Wuterich's guilty plea ended an ongoing trial at Camp Pendleton, California.
Prosecutors argued that on the day of the killings, Sgt Wuterich lost control after seeing a friend blown apart by a bomb, and then led the soldiers under his command on a rampage.
Among the dead were women, children and elderly people, including a man in a wheelchair.
His former squad members testified during the hearings that they did not receive any incoming gunfire during nor find any weapons at the scene of the killings.
Several of them said, however, that they feared insurgents were hiding nearby and they had not done anything wrong by opening fire.
The Haditha killings were citied as a key reason why Iraqi officials refused to give US troops immunity from their court system.
That sticking point helped contribute to the eventual pullout of US troops from Iraq at the end of 2011.