AMERICAN Marines should face charges over the killing of Terry Lloyd, the ITN war correspondent shot in the head as he lay injured in Iraq, a coroner said yesterday.

The death of the journalist was an unlawful killing, Andrew Walker ruled at the end of an inquest in Oxford. The coroner said that he would report his findings to the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney-General to try to bring the US soldiers to justice.

Legal sources said that any homicide charges against the Marines and their commanding officers would have to be brought in the US courts if the Americans decided to go ahead with a trial.

It remained uncertain whether the soldiers could face alternative war-crimes charges under the Geneva Convention for behaving, as Mr Lloyd’s widow later said, “like trigger-happy cowboys”.

In Washington, the Pentagon said that its investigation concluded in May 2003 that forces followed applicable rules of engagement: “The Department of Defence has never deliberately targeted non-combatants, including journalists. We have always gone to extreme measures to avoid civilian casualties and collateral damage.”

Mr Lloyd was lying injured in the back of a makeshift ambulance on his way to hospital when the vehicle was fired on by a tank crew. The coroner said that he was satisfied that it was the intention of those who opened fire to kill or cause serious injury to the wounded inside the minibus.

“I am, having carefully taken into account all the evidence, satisfied, so I am sure that had this killing taken place under English law it would have constituted an unlawful homicide,” he said.

Mr Lloyd, 50, was on the road to Basra — nicknamed the Highway of Hell — two days after the start of the war when he and three colleagues became trapped in crossfire between US Abraham tanks and an Iraqi truck armed with a machinegun near the Shatt al-Basra bridge.

The inquest was told that he was first hit in the back by a Russian-made Iraqi bullet and could have survived if he had received prompt medical attention. An Iraqi civilian in a minibus stopped to help the veteran correspondent, who was dressed in a yellow T-shirt and jeans and wore a press card around his neck, and several wounded Iraqi soldiers.

On his way to the Republican Hospital in Basra, the Americans opened fire and Mr Lloyd received a fatal head wound from a tracer bullet that penetrated the vehicle.

The coroner was provided with soldiers’ statements from the US authorities, made during investigations into the incident by the Royal Military Police, but only with the proviso that their identities would remain secret. Mr Walker, who criticised the Marines for repeatedly refusing a request to give oral evidence to the inquest, rejected their “self-serving” statements as part of the evidence under his consideration after submissions by counsel for the family and ITN.

In two weeks of evidence, the inquest had been told that Mr Lloyd was first a passenger in a 4x4 vehicle driven by his Belgian cameraman, Daniel Demoustier. After passing US tanks, he saw Iraqi soldiers on a bridge and told Mr Lloyd, “This doesn’t look good”, before performing a U-turn that took both vehicles back towards the US tanks. Mr Demoustier escaped injury. An Iraqi translator, Hussein Osman, who was in a following 4x4, died, while the remains of a French cameraman, Fred Nerac, have never been found.

Iraqi witnesses told the inquest that the two in the rear 4x4 were taken and placed in the Iraqi vehicle. The vehicle then drew alongside Mr Lloyd’s 4x4, at which point gunfire started as “all hell broke loose”, according to the cameraman. Mr Walker said that the three dead men were in his view “members of that rare breed whose professionalism and dedication in the face of great danger can only be admired”.

The coroner told the inquest: “In my view I have no doubt that the minibus presented no threat to the American forces as, firstly, it was a civilian vehicle, and secondly it stopped and turned around to pick up survivors and was facing away from the American forces. It was obvious that wounded persons were getting into the vehicle. If the vehicle was perceived as a threat then it would have been fired on before it did a U-turn. This would have resulted in damage to the front. There is no such damage.

“I have no doubt that it was the fact that the vehicle stopped to pick up survivors that prompted the Americans to fire at the vehicle. It must be the case that the Americans who opened fire saw people getting into the minibus and must have seen that one of them needed the help of another person and was clearly injured.”

A tearful Chelsey Lloyd, 24, the daughter of the newsman, said: “We have waited for 3½ years to hear the truth. The killing of my father would seem to amount to murder.”

Lynn Lloyd, married to the journalist for 29 years, said: “The verdict of unlawful killing was inescapable because US Forces appear to have allowed their soldiers to behave like trigger-happy cowboys in an area in which there were civilians travelling on a highway, both Iraqi and European. The Marines should now stand trial. Under the Geneva Convention Act that trial should be for murder and nothing less.”

A LIFE ON THE FRONT LINE: TERRY LLOYD

• Joined ITN in 1983, specialising in crime stories before becoming a war correspondent. ITN’s longest-serving reporter
• First television journalist to report from the Iraqi city of Halabja after Saddam Hussein dropped a chemical bomb on the Kurds there
• Won an award for his reports on the “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo
• Was also in Cambodia in 1997 reporting on the fighting
• Was deployed to Kuwait in 2003 to cover the invasion of Iraq. He was a unilateral reporter, not embedded with the Armed Forces

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