Iraq court to free U.S. killings suspect: lawyer

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

BAGHDAD | Mon May 7, 2012 8:19am EDT

(Reuters) - A suspected Hezbollah militant accused of masterminding the killing of Americans in Iraq has been cleared of all charges and will be freed, his lawyer said on Monday, in an announcement that is likely to anger Washington.

Ali Mussa Daqduq was accused of training Iraqi militants and orchestrating a 2007 kidnapping attack that killed five U.S. troops.

"The Iraqi judiciary decided to dismiss all the charges against him and release him without any conditions because there was a lack of evidence," his lawyer Abdulalmehdi al-Mutiri said by telephone.

Daqduq's case became a source of tension between Baghdad and Washington in the run-up to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in December.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/07/us-iraq-hezbollah-idUSBRE8460GO20120507

[Horse with no Name]

1. Not surprising when we do the same all of the time

How many soldiers have been exonerated for atrocities?

[gratuitous]

2. "An announcement that is likely to anger Washington"

Nuff said. In Washington, we've dispensed with all those messy preliminaries of evidence and witnesses, procedure and trial. We just go straight to the execution, which is so much quicker and governed by the hallowed principle of necessity, which I'm sure we all remember from our middle school civics classes.

Don't those Iraqis know that due process can't be trusted to lead to justice? At least, not the way a team of trained assassins can.