** US soldier charged with rape, murder in Iraq **
Alastair Macdonald * 28 minutes ago*
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - An American was charged on Monday with raping and murdering an Iraqi teenager after killing her parents and young sister while serving as a soldier in Iraq.
Three other troops may have been part of the crime in March.
Revealed last week and denounced by clerics as showing the “real, ugly face of America,” the case could be particularly damaging to the U.S. image in Iraq’s conservative Muslim society even after several other murder cases in the past few weeks.
Discharged soldier Steven Green, 21, appeared in court in Charlotte, North Carolina, on a charge from a federal prosecutor in Kentucky that he went with three others to a house near Mahmudiya, just south of Baghdad, to rape a woman there.
Green, who faces the death penalty, shot dead a man, woman and girl then raped another woman and killed her, the U.S. attorney said in a statement. Court documents said he had since been discharged from the army due to a “personality disorder.”
Mahmudiya’s mayor and other local officials named the family and said Abeer Qasim Hamza was 16 when she was raped and killed, although U.S. investigators have the victim’s age as 20. U.S. soldiers first put the family’s killing down to insurgents.
The attackers, who may have manned a nearby checkpoint, then burned the bodies, Mayor Muayyad Fadhil told Reuters: “They were found killed and burned on the morning of March 12.”
He said Abeer’s sister Hadeel was aged 10 when she died.
Hospital director Dawood al-Taie said his morgue received four burned bodies and briefly showed their death certificates: “Gunshot to the head and chest. Face unrecognizable due to burns,” read the document for Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi.
Taie said he had no record that evidence of rape was found.
TABOO SUBJECT
U.S. officials have given few details beyond saying that the four dead were all related and that one was a child. The troops under suspicion are from the 502nd Infantry Regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Division, based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Slightly inconsistent versions of events are now emerging from local people in a violent area dubbed the “triangle of death.” Most residents and officials agree the killings happened in a settlement 7 km (4 miles) from Mahmudiya and say the family were Sunni Muslims from the powerful Janabi tribe.
The accusations of rape, a taboo subject among rural Iraqi Muslims, may have contributed to a reluctance to publicize the killings – few Iraqi media have given coverage to the case.
But it also makes the case explosive for public opinion, even after a string of other charges being brought against U.S. troops as commanders crack down on misconduct toward civilians.
The Sunni Muslim Clerics Association said on Sunday the Mahmudiya case revealed “the real, ugly face of America.”
Mayor Fadhil acknowledged it was a “dangerous subject.”
Anxious not to create new enemies and to leave behind a friendly Iraq when troops withdraw, U.S. commanders have issued orders to tighten up procedures on dealing with civilians.
Already tarnished by the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in 2004, revelations in March of inquiries into the killing of 24 people at Haditha risk further damaging the U.S. image in Iraq.
Last month, 12 troops were charged with murder in two other cases, more than doubling the number of such charges in the war.
The Washington Post, which put the daughters’ ages at 15 and 7, quoted neighbor Omar Janabi as saying Abeer Qasim’s mother told him on March 10 the young woman had complained about advances made toward her by U.S. soldiers at a nearby checkpoint.
Janabi told the paper he was among the first to arrive at the house after an attack on March 11. He said he found Abeer sprawled dead in a corner, her hair and a pillow next to her consumed by fire, and her dress pushed up to her neck.
The inquiry was launched after two soldiers from the 502nd Infantry Regiment came forward late last month, just after two men from the unit were kidnapped and killed near Mahmudiya.
(Additional reporting by Deborah Charles and Kristin Roberts in Washington and a Reuters reporter in Mahmudiya)](“http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news/?p=Abu+Ghraib”)