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Coverup of Iraq Incident By Marines Is Alleged
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Instead, he said, the Marine Corps issued a statement that falsely asserted that the Iraqis had been killed in the initial bomb blast. The Marines knew that was not true, he said, because they issued payments to the families of the dead, which are made only to compensate for accidental deaths inflicted by U.S. troops.
"We know the Iraqis knew about it, because they [the Marines] made payments to the Iraqis for accidental deaths," he said.
The Denver Post reported yesterday that $38,000 was paid to relatives in Haditha. Mike Coffman, the Colorado state treasurer who served in Iraq recently as a Marine reservist, told the newspaper that the amount was relatively large, and so indicated that the Marines knew that something had gone wrong in the operation in the town that day.
"We don't know how far it goes," Murtha said of the alleged coverup. "The Marines knew about it all this time. Somebody in the chain of command decided not to allow this to happen. How far up it went, I don't know."
Asked about Murtha's charges, Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas, a Marine Corps spokesman, said: "The investigation isn't complete, so it isn't appropriate for me to comment."
Murtha also talked about a more recent allegation against a separate group of Marines in western Iraq accused of killing an Iraqi man and then trying to make it look as if the victim had been planting a makeshift bomb. "A Marine, or some Marines, pulled somebody out of a house, put them next to an IED [improvised explosive device] thing, fired some AKs so they'd have cartridges there, and then tried to cover that up," Murtha said.
The case concerns a man killed April 26 near Fallujah. The U.S. military disclosed the case in a statement Wednesday, sent after midnight Baghdad time, saying local Iraqi leaders had brought the killing to the attention of the U.S. military and it is under criminal investigation by the military. Several Marines assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, have been recalled to their base at Camp Pendleton, Calif., in that investigation.
Correspondent Ellen Knickmeyer in Baghdad contributed to this report.
