CAIRO – Iraqi eyewitnesses on Sunday, June 11, accused the US forces of having beaten to death the badly-injured Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after he survived a US air strike on his hideout, an accusation immediately denied by the US army.
"We found the body of a big man, middle-aged. There was life in him still," Ali Abbas, 25, a laborer, recalled in an interview with the Sunday Times.
The US and the Iraqi government announced last Thursday, June 8, that Zarqawi and seven of his associates were killed a day earlier in a US air strike on a farmhouse in the village of Hibhib, near the western Iraqi city of Baqouba.
An F-16 launched two 500 pound (227 kilogram) bombs, one laser-guided and one GPS-guided, at the house.
"It took seven of us to move him from within the rubble and carry him out about 100 meters," said Abbas, referring to the bombed house.
"He had a black dishdasha [robe]. His hair was longish and his beard soft black. He just moaned over and over again. He had an injury to the back of his head."
Edgy Americans
Abbas recalled that as they dragged the man from under the ruins, an ambulance and Iraqi forces turned up, totally 14 people on the scene.
He added that they had barely placed the wounded in the ambulance when seven US helicopters landed by the house and four Humvees rumbled through the dust.
"They were shouting and screaming and in a very tense and agitated mood," said Abbas.
"They lined us up in a ditch and told us to turn our faces. We thought they were going to execute us. I started reciting Quran verses to myself."
The Americans then took the injured man from the ambulance and placed his stretcher on the ground.
"The Americans tore his dishdasha and they kept on asking him through an interpreter, ‘What is your name, what is your name?’," said Abbas.
They later started to kick him in the chest, said Abbas and an Iraqi policeman also there.
"They kept kicking him, shouting, ‘What’s your name?’, but the man only moaned and said nothing," said Abbas.
He added that as the small crowd of Iraqis looked on, the man grew paler and began bleeding from his mouth and nose.
Abbas estimates it took about a quarter of an hour for him to die from the time when he was removed from the ambulance.
When he saw pictures of the dead Zarqawi on television the next day, with his face swollen, cheeks bruised, eyes closed with streaks of blood beneath his skull he was sure it was the same man.
Discounted
The Observer also quoted another eyewitness as confirming the report.
The man told the British weekly that US soldiers pulled out a man resembling Zarqawi from an ambulance where locals had placed him, wrapped his dishdasha around his head and "battered him severely till he died".
The two British newspapers carried US military confirmation that Zarqawi was not dead in the strike and that he had tried to roll off the stretcher when he realized the soldiers' identity.
The Observer, however, said that although there was no corroboration of the claims, revelations of revenge killings by US troops "means it cannot be discounted".
Last November, US forces killed 24 Iraqi civilians in cold blood in Haditha as they went on rampage after the killing of a US Marine in a bomb attack.
Baloney
Washington's top military commander in Iraq immediately dismissed the reports as "ludicrous".
"That's baloney," General George Casey told the Fox News Sunday television program.
"We've already gone back and looked at it. Our soldiers who came on the scene found him being put in an ambulance by Iraqi police, they took him off, rendered first aid, and he expired," said the top brass.
"He died while American soldiers were attempting to save his life. So the idea that there were people there beating him is just ludicrous."
The US military said Sunday that military doctor have completed an autopsy on Zarqawi's body.
US military spokesman Major William Wilhoite said the military was now "awaiting the findings" of the medical examination conducted by two doctors flown in from outside Iraq.
Caldwell said Saturday the autopsy was being done to see "how he actually died" after repeated queries about the conditions of Zarqawi's death.
Click to read the Sunday Times report in full