(4 of 8)
According to official accounts, the rest of Kilo Company's day was routine. It discovered three other IEDs and destroyed them in controlled explosions, and it raided what it believed to be a safe house, detained some men and found roughly 20 Jordanian passports on the premises.
WHO'S RESPONSIBLE?
A team of investigators from NCIS has already spent weeks in Haditha unraveling the events of Nov. 19. Khaled Raseef, a spokesman for the victims' relatives and an uncle of some of the children who were killed, says the NCIS agents have visited the houses attacked by the Marines 15 times, taken survivors to one of the homes and performed a re-enactment of the unit's movements. A U.S. military source in Iraq told TIME that investigators have placed the noncommissioned officer in charge of the unit that day, Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, 26, in at least two of the houses where the Marines killed Iraqis. Wuterich, who is based at California's Camp Pendleton, the vast Marine base north of San Diego, has not been relieved of duty, say military officials. His lawyer did not return telephone calls.
A separate team of investigators, meanwhile, is focusing on official deception: Did officers in Kilo Company--or further up the chain of command--cover up what happened that day? A Marine communiqué on Nov. 20 claimed that 15 Iraqi civilians had been killed, as Terrazas was, by the IED and that gunmen afterward opened fire on the Marines, who then killed eight insurgents. Only after Iraqi complaints of an atrocity were brought to the military's attention by TIME did the Marines acknowledge that all the Iraqis had died from gunfire. The Marines on April 7 removed two officers in the chain of command--the captain who led Kilo Company and his battalion commander. The corps is braced for the possibility that Bargewell's probe could go further up the command roster.
Despite the material documenting the carnage of that November morning, proving that the Marines deliberately killed civilians will be a challenge. TIME reported last week that in addition to a videotape made by an enterprising journalism student in the neighborhood the day after the shootings, investigators have found real-time photographs taken by a Marine on patrol the day of the incident. There may also be surveillance tape taken by a military drone that was operating in the area. But prosecuting a criminal case in a court-martial won't be simple. More than six months have passed since the shootings, a lapse of time that defense lawyers will argue has given accusers a chance to alter or coordinate their stories. And there is the question of whether forensics evidence can be obtained that would help the prosecutors prove a charge of premeditated murder. Investigators have asked to exhume the bodies of victims, but families have so far refused. Muslims generally frown on disturbing interred bodies, although some Islamic scholars say exhumation is permissible if it would lead to truth and justice.
CAN IT HAPPEN AGAIN?