Iraqi mom curses US officer

2004-07-29 19:51

Baghdad - A grieving Iraqi mother said she had put a curse on a United States military officer charged with killing her son, who worked as a driver for one of the top aides of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.

"The American soldier who killed my son tore out a piece of my heart," says Hadhun Mahbas Sirhan with tears in her eyes.

"I put a curse on him from here until eternity."

On Wednesday, Captain Rogelio Maynulet, 29, appeared before an investigating officer in a military courthouse at a US base in Germany, charged with killing Karim Abed Ali at close range in an incident in late May in Kufa, south of Baghdad.

The dead man's seven orphaned children huddled around their grandmother on a straw mat in a brick house on a dirt road near a landfill in one of the Iraqi capital's most-miserable neighbourhoods.

Mohammed, aged four, clutches a framed photograph of himself seated on his father's lap with the caption beneath reading "The blessed martyr".

Never thought of bearing arms

Earlier this year, Abed Ali, 36, impressed Mohammed al-Tabtabai, one of Sadr's top aides, so much that he offered him a job as his driver.

They met while Abed Ali and his brother Qassim were working on a construction job in one of Sadr's offices in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City.

Qassim, 33, says that although he and his family may sympathise with Sadr and his calls for the US-led occupation force to leave Iraq, they never thought of bearing arms or fighting alongside his Mehdi Army militia.

The militia was embroiled in an anti-coalition rebellion in April and May in which hundreds of people were killed.

Abed Ali was to drive Tabtabai down to Kufa every Friday to attend weekly prayers at the grand mosque there, visit his family in the area and then bring him back to Baghdad, said Qassim.

At the height of Sadr's stand-off with the US military in Najaf in May, Tabtabai came out of prayers with Abed Ali and another companion and got into a black BMW, which was chased by US troops, who may have confused the bearded Tabtabai with Sadr.

An arrest warrant was out against Sadr in connection with the murder of a rival cleric and the coalition had vowed to capture or kill him.

Faces court-martial hearings

After a chase in Kufa's dusty back streets, US troops fired at the car, wounding those on board and forcing the car into a wall, says Abed Ali's eldest brother, Nimeh, 42.

Tabtabai rushed into a nearby home and as Abed Ali was getting out of the car Maynulet allegedly came up and shot him in the head, according to Abed Ali.

If convicted, Maynulet will face court-martial hearings and a full court martial could result in him being jailed, fined and dismissed from the army.

Abed Ali's family says it has no faith in US military justice.

- AFP