AN IRAQI Army medic told a US military hearing yesterday that he was sick for weeks after finding the charred body of an Iraqi girl who was allegedly raped and murdered by five US soldiers.

The medic testified on the opening day of a hearing to decide whether the five soldiers should be court martialled for the murder of Abeer al-Janabi, 14, her five-year-old sister and their parents on March 12 in the town of Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad.

The medic, whose identity is secret, told the hearing at a US army base in Baghdad that he was the first person to enter the girl’s home after the incident. He found she had been killed by a single bullet under her left eye. Her murderers had set her body on fire in an apparent attempt to destroy evidence of their crime.

In an adjoining room, he found her younger sister, Hadeel, had been shot through the head. The girls’ father, Qassim, and their mother, Fikhriya, had also been killed. He said that the scene made him sick for weeks.

The case is the fifth being pursued by the US military against its own troops in Iraq.

The five soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division are accused of drinking, changing into civilian clothes and abandoning their checkpoint in the so-called Triangle of Death to go to the house of the girl, whom they had seen walking past their position.

They could face the death penalty if found guilty. One, Steven Green, has already been discharged from the military for a “personality disorder” and will be tried in a US civilian court.

A former reporter with the US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes wrote last week that in an interview before the murders Green had told him that “killing people is like squashing an ant”.

“I came over here because I wanted to kill people,” Green, 21, said in The Washington Post. “The truth is, it wasn’t all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, ‘All right, whatever’. I mean, you kill somebody and it’s like, ‘All right, let’s go get some pizza’.”

Guerrillas kidnapped two soldiers from the same unit in June, torturing and killing the men in what they claimed was revenge for the girl’s rape and murder.

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