AN AMERICAN soldier told a military tribunal in Iraq yesterday how his comrades smiled before shooting dead three handcuffed Iraqi prisoners and threatened to kill him if he told anyone what they had done.

The murder charges, already controversial for a military prosecuting cases of massacre, rape and murder by its troops in Iraq, has been made all the more difficult for the Army by the accused soldiers’ defence that they were following orders to kill all military-aged males.

They claim that the order was issued by the same officer who in 1993 led the ill-fated raid in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, featured in the film Black Hawk Down.

The trial, held at a US army base in Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit, heard testimony from Private Bradley Mason that three of his comrades bound and shot three Iraqi prisoners during a raid on a suspected al-Qaeda training camp on a river island near Samarra, 60 miles (97km) north of Baghdad.

The soldiers, from the 3rd Combat Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, arrived early on the morning of May 9 at the suspected base in a disused chemical factory by helicopter.

Private Mason, 20, testifying against the defendants, said that he shot one man at the window of a house at the site, who later turned out to be “old and unarmed”. The squad then detained three other men and two women found hiding inside two houses. Inside the buildings they found an assault rifle, a pistol and ammunition, not unusual for an Iraqi home. None of the men had weapons on them, Private Mason told the tribunal, which was to decide whether there were grounds for a full court martial for premeditated murder.

Private Mason said that Staff Sergeant Raymond Girouard, the squad leader, told him that two of the defendants, Private Corey Clagett and Specialist William Hunsaker, were going to kill the detainees.

“They just smiled,” he said, describing the men’s reaction to Sergeant Girouard’s comment. “I told him that I’m not down with it. It’s murder,” Private Mason said. He then reported gunshots and found the detainees dead.

He said that Sergeant Girouard then warned him: “If you say anything I’ll kill you.”

“Clagett told me that one of the detainees had broken out of his flex cuffs,” Private Mason said. Specialist Hunsaker said that the mark on his face was a knife wound inflicted by one of the escaping detainees. Private Mason said that he looked for a knife but could find none.

Paul Bergrin, the attorney for the accused men, who also represented defendants in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse case, told the court that his clients had been obeying orders that if the soldiers encountered any Iraqi men they were to kill them.

Mr Bergrin said that the order had been issued before the raid by the commanding officer of the unit, Colonel Michael Steele, who led the raid in Mogadishu in 1993 in which 18 US soldiers and hundreds of Somalis were killed.

Colonel Steele has signed a document declaring his intention to refuse to testify in the case to avoid incriminating himself. The investigation started after one of the soldiers complained of nightmares and told his superiors of the incident. The case comes at a highly sensitive time for the US military, which has charged four soldiers, also from the 101st Airborne Division, for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in Mahmoudiya, to the south of Baghdad, and is investigating allegations of a massacre by Marines of up to two dozen people in the town of Haditha last year.

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