Trump pardons Blackwater contractors jailed for massacre of Iraqis
Washington (QNN)- President Donald Trump has granted a full pardon to 15 people, including four former government contractors convicted in a 2007 massacre in Baghdad that left more than a dozen Iraqi civilians dead and caused an international uproar over the use of mercenaries in a war zone.
The four guards (Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard and Nicholas Slatten) were part of an armoured convoy that opened fire indiscriminately with machine-guns, grenade launchers and a sniper on a crowd of unarmed people in a square in Baghdad.
The Nisour Square massacre was one of the lowest episodes of the US occupation of Iraq. At least two of the 14 killed at the time were children.
This is Ali. He was 9 years old when Blackwater contractors whom Trump pardoned today murdered him. No justice for Ali, but let's keep asking, "why do they hate us?" https://t.co/gvrOHQhKE3 pic.twitter.com/4sUcBoCArl
— Sarah Leah Whitson (@sarahleah1) December 23, 2020
An initial prosecution was thrown out by a federal judge – sparking outrage in Iraq – but the then vice-president, Joe Biden, promised to pursue a fresh prosecution, which succeeded in 2015.
At the sentencing, the US attorney’s office said in a statement: “The sheer amount of unnecessary human loss and suffering attributable to the defendants’ criminal conduct on 16 September 2007 is staggering.”
After news of the pardon emerged on Tuesday night, Brian Heberlig, a lawyer for one of the four pardoned Blackwater defendants, said: “Paul Slough and his colleagues didn’t deserve to spend one minute in prison. I am overwhelmed with emotion at this fantastic news.”
The outgoing president also pardoned Alex van der Zwaan, 36, the Dutch son-in-law of Russian billionaire German Khan.
Van der Zwaan was sentenced to 30 days in prison and fined $20,000 for lying to US Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators about contacts with an official in Trump’s 2016 campaign.
