WIESBADEN, Germany, April 1 -- A decorated Army captain convicted in the shooting death of a wounded Iraqi was dismissed from the military Friday but will serve no time in prison after insisting at his court-martial that the shooting was a mercy killing.
Capt. Rogelio Maynulet, 30, threw his arms around his attorneys, wife and parents after the military court spared him a prison sentence. Prosecutors had sought a three-year term along with the dismissal.
Maynulet could have faced 10 years in prison after being convicted Thursday of assault with intent to commit voluntary manslaughter. He maintained throughout the trial that he had acted to end the suffering of a man he was told was beyond medical help.
Maynulet said after the sentence that he was grateful to avoid imprisonment but that leaving the military would be difficult.
"It's bittersweet," he said. "I'm happy to have my life back, but I'm being forced out of my family. It's hard to leave the Army this way."
Maynulet was leading his 1st Armored Division company on a mission near Kufa, south of Baghdad, on May 21, 2004, when troops were alerted that a car thought to be carrying a high-level target was headed their way.
No details of the mission have been released, but it has been widely reported that the company was told that Moqtada Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric whose loyalists led uprisings against U.S.-led forces in Iraq last year, was believed to be in the car.
The company chased the car and fired at it, wounding a passenger, who fled and was later apprehended, and the driver, who was pulled bleeding from the car by Maynulet's medic.
The medic pronounced the man untreatable and Maynulet later shot him in the head. The killing was filmed by an unmanned U.S. surveillance aircraft.
