MID: US soldier charged with murder of five comrades
13 May 2009 12:38 AM
BAGHDAD, May 12 AFP - A US soldier has been charged with shooting dead five of his colleagues at an American base in Baghdad, a US army spokesman said on Tuesday.
Sergeant John M Russell allegedly opened fire on his colleagues at a counselling clinic in the sprawling Camp Liberty in Baghdad on Monday.
Major General David Perkins told a media briefing in the Iraqi capital that Russell was charged with five counts of murder and one charge of aggravated assault.
Those killed were two medical officers serving at the counselling centre and three enlisted soldiers who happened to be there at the time, Perkins said.
Because of concern over the state of Russell's mental health, his commanding officer about a week earlier had ordered that the soldier's weapon be confiscated and that he should go for counselling, Perkins said.
"Through that process his commander had determined it would be best for him not to have a weapon," he said.
However, details of the chronology of events and more specifically, how Russell had come to acquire the second weapon that allowed him to shoot his comrades, were still being investigated.,
"We have many different accounts into exactly what happened," Perkins said.
Such shooting incidents have not been all that common in Iraq but nearly a fifth of American soldiers deployed there suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), according to the US military's battlemind.army.mil website.
In the last such reported incident, US media widely reported that Sergeant Joseph Bozicevich, 39, had allegedly shot dead two of his superiors at a base south of Baghdad last September 14.
The dead men were named as staff sergeant Darris Dawson, 24, and sergeant Wesley Durbin, 26, and the reports said Bozicevich could not bear being berated by them.
The latest attack caused the single deadliest toll of US forces in Iraq since April 10 when five soldiers were killed by a suicide truck bomb in the northern city of Mosul.
A total of 4,294 American troops have died since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, according to an AFP count based on the independent website icasualties.org.
