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| Haditha Marine Frank Wuterich enters guilty plea | Haditha Marine Frank Wuterich enters guilty plea |
| (40 minutes later) | |
| 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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, almost seven years after the events in question. | |
| 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. | |
| While the events in Haditha occurred in November 2005, an investigation did not begin until a local human rights activist went public with video footage of the aftermath. | |
| No immunity | |
| A subsequent investigation by Time magazine suggested that most of the dead were shot by Marines - and in March 2006 a criminal investigation was begun. | |
| The following month, three officers in charge of troops in Haditha were stripped of their command and reassigned. | |
| Sgt Wuterich's trial was delayed for years by debate between the defence and prosecution - including whether or not they could show previously unseen footage from a 60 Minutes interview he gave to US network CBS in 2007. | |
| Prosecutors eventually won the right to show the entire interview. | |
| The Haditha killings were cited 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. |