U.S. Prosecutor Goes to Iraq to Work on Blackwater Case – reprot

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: The New York Times on Sunday reported that an American prosecutor working on the case against five Blackwater security guards indicted in connection with a 2007 shooting in Baghdad has arrived in Iraq and will be meeting with victims’ families this week, Iraqi officials said. An Iraqi official familiar with the investigation said the meeting with victims’ families would take place on Saturday in a large dining center in Iraq’s National Police Headquarters, just a stone’s throw from Nisour Square, the traffic circle in Baghdad where at least 17 Iraqis were killed by private security guards working for Blackwater Worldwide on Sept. 16, 2007. The American Embassy in Baghdad is contacting victims’ families ahead of Saturday’s meeting, the official said. The prosecutor will make a presentation to the families as a group, he said, briefing them about how the investigation has been conducted to date, taking them through what will happen during the trial, and explaining how they can make claims against Blackwater. “The prosecutor is coming on Saturday to tell people what is going to happen, and especially how to make claims,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the investigation. “He will speak in front of all of them. The families of the victims deserve to know what comes next.” A team from the F.B.I. is in Iraq, the official said, and has been interviewing Iraqi witnesses to the shootings. Four Iraqi witnesses have been extensively interviewed and the American government is planning to fly them to the United States in order to testify at the trial, he added. An F.B.I. spokeswoman, reached in Washington, said she had “no comment on Blackwater.” Blackwater maintains that its employees, hired to guard American diplomats in Iraq, were firing in response to an attack. But Iraqi investigators, supported by witness accounts, have failed to turn up evidence of any attack on Blackwater guards that might have provoked the shooting. Abdulwahab Abdulkader, a 33-year-old bank employee who is one of the four Iraqi witnesses expected to testify at the trial, said he was on his way to buy a birthday gift for a friend’s daughter when he got caught in a traffic jam at Nisour Square on the morning of the shooting. The gridlock, he said, included a convoy of Blackwater vehicles. Mr. Abdulkader said the company’s guards opened fire on the vehicles in the traffic circle without warning or apparent provocation. He said he watched a car with a woman and a young man inside explode into flames after it came under fire. Frightened, he said he started to drive in the direction of his house, but a Blackwater vehicle followed him and forced him to stop by ramming into his car. He said the company’s guards fired three shots through the roof. One of the bullets hit him in the right arm. He said he still had some difficulty performing certain tasks with his arm. In the weeks after the shooting, Mr. Abdulkader said F.B.I. agents showed him satellite images of the circle and asked him detailed questions about the position of his car and the direction that the bullets had come from. Agents also examined his car, he said, and eventually purchased it from him. Mr. Abdulkader said he had been flown in May to the United States, where he appeared before a federal grand jury. He also said that he and other victims had been invited to Blackwater’s offices in Baghdad’s Green Zone and that the United States Embassy in Baghdad had given him $7,500 as partial compensation. MH (R)/SR 1