'No justice, just kills’

23:23Mike Maloney also looked at the forensic evidence there to try and work out what happened. That back bedroom in House 2 was horrific. We had what appeared to be two adults and five children that were basically killed on a bed. What happened in here that allowed two women and five children to be identified as a threat, as a target, and to be mitigated would be the polite word. I'll use the word executed. You're listening to No Justice Just Kills, a BBC Eye investigation for the documentary for the BBC World Service. I'm Lara El-Ghebeli.

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25:44We're looking into the longest war crimes investigation in U.S. history, the trial of U.S. Marines for the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005. Among them were Safa Yunus' whole family.

26:02They were innocent people We didn't even have any weapons in the house They killed my mom and dad My sisters, Noor, Sabah, Zainab, Aisha And my brother Muhammad too And my aunt Huda I was the only survivor out of my entire family

26:27I meet Safa at her new house in Haditha where she lives with her husband and three children I will never forget my family but thank God, God made it up to me and I now have a family of my own I consider my daughter Mariam like my sister and Yahya, my son, is like a brother to me We watch her children play in the garden, her youngest boy chasing around a toy car, her older son taking the chickens out of the coop and offering to let me hold them. I ask Safa if her children know about what happened to their grandparents, to the aunts and uncles they would never get to know.

27:13I gave them some information so they know the basics. They know that their grandfather was killed by the Americans. But they don't know the details. Though she doesn't live there anymore, Safa agreed to take us back to her old home.

27:35This is the home where Safa's entire family were shot. The white side door still has bullet holes in it from when the Marines stormed the house in 2005. They would have come in through this door, straight into the kitchen. To the left, there's a hallway, and all the way at the end is the bedroom where Safa and her family would have been huddled, waiting. In that room were Safa's aunt and mother, four sisters and brother, aged between three and thirteen. Her father had already been shot at the front door of the house. Even though it's painful for me to come to this house, I insist on coming here to remember my siblings, how I used to play with them, to remember my parents and the life we used to live.

28:22Despite the tragedy that happened, I want to keep their memories with me forever. Safa says she still remembers exactly what happened that day, when she was 14. We heard a gunshot. I was a child, I was scared. We were gathered in one room. One of the soldiers had something in his hand and came in. I didn't know what it was because I was young, but I found out later it was a grenade. He threw it into the room and closed the door. We all ran and climbed on the bed, but it didn't explode. My aunt opened the door and saw that my father had been shot. She screamed, and then a soldier came in and fired randomly at us.

29:02Me and my sister Noor were on the edge of the bed, so we got down. He heard a sound, so he put his gun under the bed and shot. I pretended to be dead and didn't move. Then he left. I wanted to tell my sister Noor that they'd all left. I tried to stroke her on the head, but my hand was covered in blood. Her skull was in pieces. I knew she was dead.

29:31After the incident, the Marines went back to all the sites where people were killed in Haditha to take photos for their records. These photos were made public last year, and they are truly devastating. They show children's bodies huddled on a bed with their mother, all with multiple gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Which of the Marines shot Safa's aunt, mother and siblings, young, innocent children? This was the central question of the criminal investigation. The Marines who entered Safa's house that day were Frank Wutteridge, the squad leader, Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum, and the most junior member of the squad, Umberto Mendoza.

30:14The series called back to order. May I call your first witness? So, Mendoza. We have audio recordings of the testimonies given to the court by each of the Marines on what happened. This is very rare access to the proceedings of a military courtroom. The recordings aren't great quality, so we've had someone else speak Mendoza's words. Here he is describing what he did in House 2. I see somebody trying to open the door. An adult male. I opened fire. The male went down. Mendoza is describing shooting Safa's father at the door. He says he did it because he was ordered to by the squad leader, Frank Wittredge.

30:56Then, Mendoza says, he approaches the back bedroom. When I open the door, the first thing I see is women and kids laying down on the bed. I close the door and start talking to Lance Corporal Tatum. I told him that there were women and kids inside the room, sir. He says, well, shoot them. I said, they're just women and kids. So as I started walking back again to my position, I could hear him opening the door, sir. I hear a loud noise coming from inside the house, sir. So Mendoza is basically saying Tatum killed everyone, single-handedly. But Tatum tells a very different story. In his version, he's in the back bedroom, not on his own, but with Witteridge, the squad leader.

31:46Here's Tatum's courtroom testimony. We've had an actor read his statement, as it's hard to hear clearly. We immediately proceeded down this hallway. Who was the first Marine to proceed down the hallway? It would be Staff Sergeant Woodridge, sir. It would be Staff Sergeant Woodridge, sir. He's muzzled up, ready to engage any individual coming out of the two doors in front of us, sir. He proceeded in front through door two, and I went through door one, sir. Right about at that same time, in the room that Staff Sergeant Woodridge had entered, I heard M-16 firing. I immediately came in and started engaging targets.

32:24It was very dark. I couldn't really see too much in the room. There were particles in the air. It was dusty. I saw four to five silhouettes, big, small. I was not in that room any more than two to three seconds.

32:41Tatum says that because it was dark and dusty, he couldn't identify the people in the room. But looking through the hundreds of pages of legal documents, we find something that completely contradicts that. In three separate statements given to NCIS during the investigation, Tatum said he knowingly shot the children, Safa's siblings. These were written statements, so an actor is voicing Tatum's words. On April 16, 2006, Tatum said this to investigators. I saw that children were in the room kneeling down. I don't remember the exact number, but only that it was a lot. I'm trained to shoot two shots to the chest and two shots to the head, and I followed my training.

33:25Then, a few weeks later on May 9th, 2006, in another statement, Tatum said, I was able to positively identify the people in the room as women and children before shooting them. And then, eight days later, he said very clearly, This is where I saw the kid I shot. Knowing it was a kid, I still shot him. Under their US military rules of engagement, Marines have to positively identify someone as a threat before shooting them. But in three separate statements, Tatum is saying he knew the victims were children, but that he shot them anyway.

34:06We've heard Mendoza's account of events, saying Tatum was responsible for the killings. And we've heard Tatum's account, where he says he and squad leader Frank Wutteridge did the shooting. But what did Wutteridge say happened? When it came to Safa's house, he claimed not to remember a thing. For some reason, I get confused with the first and second house. It seems almost just the same to me. You know, what kind of blows my mind is, you know, NCIS and this investigation, they probably know more about what happened that day than I do. Was it possible he had blocked it out of his memory? Or was he covering up for himself and the other Marines?

34:49Forensic investigator Mike Maloney's job was to look at the evidence, together with the different versions of events, and try to figure out what actually happened. He concluded it was clear that the Marines weren't telling the whole truth. They mentioned the shooting of Safa's father by the door, and the shooting of her mother and siblings in the back bedroom. But what about Huda, Safa's aunt? When we look at Tatum and Mendoza's statement, Huda is ignored. She's not mentioned. We know she's the first one shot. We know she's shot from the hallway and collapses at the door. So at that point, we know that their statements have at least one portion where they're changing what happened.

35:32And there's another thing that he found that didn't add up. Mendoza said he left the hall and heard Tatum going into the bedroom, then a loud noise, suggesting Tatum did the shooting alone. But according to Mike Maloney's analysis, that can't be true. In our forensic reconstruction, we have the shooter penetrating into the room, turning at the foot of the bed and beginning to shoot their way across the bed. At the same time, we have someone coming in behind them, facing the bed from the side and shooting across the head of the bed on one of the victims. She actually appears to be simultaneously shot by both shooters at the same time.

36:13So that's how we're able to determine that it wasn't one shooter shooting from the door and then moving to the foot of the bed. So there were two shooters in that back bedroom. As they approached the trial back in 2008, squad leader Frank Witterich's lawyers were trying desperately to get him to remember. Here's Woodridge's lawyer, Haitham Faraj. Did you hear any shooting? I don't recall. Well, who was in the house? I don't recall. Who came out first? It was very confused. He never really had a specific answer. I mean, it was a complete black hole of memory. It was very difficult to try and put a defense together if we don't know what our client did.

36:53So they staged an exercise where they asked him to reenact the scene. It was all recorded. It's an exercise called discovering the story. It uses psychodramatic techniques to try and bring the person back to the reality of the event that you're trying to recall. I want you to close your eyes and think. You're arriving at house number two. What are you seeing? Think about the colors, the smells, everything. It's a clear day, sunny. I remember the house being white. Eventually, he starts to remember. What are you hearing right now? At this point, I think I started hearing gunfire coming from the bedroom at the end.

37:39I remember seeing Mendoza in there, but I didn't see if there was... Did you see him go in? No, I see him in there firing.

37:51This was a turning point for Woodridge's lawyers. Mendoza had never been charged for any of the killings that day. He had admitted to shooting Safa's father at the door, but he'd said Tatum was the one who had shot Safa's mother, aunt and siblings. However, Mendoza said he had opened the door into the back bedroom, and he's the only Marine who says he did that. Forensic investigator Mike Maloney says that's significant. Mendoza places himself at that room and he places himself opening the door. A lot of false statements contain 90 % of the truth. So against his own self-interest, he places himself as the primary player at that door.

38:35Safa remembered a Marine opening the door too. She was asked about it in the video taken way back in 2006.

38:47The interpreter asks if Safa saw the Marine who shot her family. She says she did, and that this same Marine had thrown in a grenade that didn't go off. It was the same person who threw the grenade and left. He is the one who came back shooting.

39:07You'd imagine that Safa's testimony would have been really useful information for Mike Maloney. who was trying to piece together what had happened. He'd had access to the statements from Khaled's family about the shootings in his house. But what about Safa's? When did you first see her testimony, and did it influence your forensic reconstruction? I was called early on by a member of the prosecution team, and I was told, we went back to Haditha, and we did some interviews. You would probably like to see them. I said, I certainly would. And they said the requirement is you cannot incorporate them in any of your reports, nor can you make your headquarters aware that you've seen these.

39:51Well, I clearly can't do that. I'm a special agent for NCIS. I'm not a rogue investigator. So at that point, I wasn't given the statements to review.

40:04Mike Maloney and the prosecution were meant to be on the same team. So what bothers me at that point is the prosecution knew that our theory of events of what happened in that room was supported by a witness. Yet they kept that from us so they could continue to pursue their series of events which didn't coincide with ours. Then, at a later hearing, Mendoza added more crucial detail to his testimony. I went inside the room. I tried to take a better look at what's going on, and it was still just women and kids inside the room. I walked about eight feet. I'm going to pause it there for a quick second.

40:50We played this recording from Mike Maloney. This is the first time I've heard this. This is interesting to me because prior to this, we very much got the impression that at this door it was a quick look, just looking in there and coming out. And now he's going eight feet into the room, which is the shooter position. So this is just amazing to me. And I've never heard this before today. Mike Maloney is now convinced that Mendoza was one of the shooters. And here's why. So Mendoza confesses to going into the room and taking a look. We have much more than a look because he then confesses to occupying the shooting position at the bottom of the bed.

41:34He then confesses to observing in detail all of the individuals on the bed, which would not necessarily be visible had he just done a quick peek at the door. So if you were to ask me, is this a confession of sorts? What I'd say is Mendoza confessed to everything except for pulling the trigger. Mendoza couldn't be charged because he had been given immunity by prosecutors in 2006. He did not respond to our questions. He admitted to shooting Safa's father, but said he was following orders. He was never charged with a criminal offence. When I first contacted Safa, she didn't know what had happened in the trial, or which of the Marines likely killed her family.

42:19So we're on our way to Safa's house now to show her the evidence that we came here to show her. And I just have no idea how she's going to react. I don't know if she really wants to see it. I don't know if this is us opening up what is a painful chapter for her that is already in the past.

42:39When we sit down in her living room after greetings and cups of tea, I ask her whether she wants to see what we've found.

42:50Of course, I want to know everything. I still have questions. It doesn't feel as if it's been 20 years. It's as if it happened last year. I still think about it and research everything about it. I want the people who did it to be held accountable and to be punished by the law.

43:14I show her a video of Mendoza taken during Wittrich's trial. Mendoza is in a courtroom, standing in front of a mock doorway, built to scale to match the doorway of the back bedroom of Safa's house. Okay, let's go, Mendoza. I want you to take the position that you took on that day. The man showed up at the door, the door was still closed, and you shot him. Mendoza admits on camera to killing Safa's father, Yunus Rasif, when he was unarmed. After he opened the door, sir. You're testifying today that he opened the door, then you shot him? Yes, sir. Okay, did you see his hands? Yes, sir. He wasn't armed?

43:57When I show this recording to Safa, she's stunned and becomes tearful. I didn't know who killed my father. This is the first time I'm seeing his face. This man should have been imprisoned from the moment it happened. It should have been impossible for him to see the light of day. There should be justice. At the very least, I should get a small part of the justice my family are owed. But what about Tatum, the Marine who Mendesza blames for the killings in the bedroom? I heard M-16 firing. I immediately came in and started engaging targets. He admitted in three statements to identifying and then shooting Safa's siblings.

44:45But his lawyers argued that the statements were obtained under duress, and they were disregarded by prosecutors. Tatum was granted immunity. We reached out to him. Through his lawyer he said he wants to put Haditha behind him. He has never withdrawn his testimony that he and Woodridge were the shooters in Safa's house. After Tatum was given immunity, the sole focus was now on Frank Woodridge. This was too messy of a story for the Marine Corps and they wanted to get rid of the story in the quickest way possible. I don't want to call Frank Woodridge a scapegoat, but he was a convenient way to get rid of this.

45:27As Woodridge's trial got closer, his lawyers were still concerned by his apparent inability to remember what had happened in Safa's house. They conducted a mock trial. We want to present you some evidence, most of which will be presented at the court-martial. This is kind of a trial run. You're a focus group. And the Marines on the mock jury gave a damning verdict. Disarable discharge in 15 years. House 2 is morally corrupt, and if I thought so, death penalty. 15 years, and even the death penalty. It seemed even Wuttrich's own peers thought he should be found guilty. He was facing the very real possibility of a lifetime in prison.

46:09Let's hear what you spell to order. Let me call your first witness. In 2012, Wuttrich's real trial began. The Haditha trial is underway at Camp Hengleton, more than six years after 24 Arabies were killed by a squad of U.S. Marines. Forensic investigator Mike Maloney was getting ready to testify that his evidence pointed to Mendoza and Tatum killing Safa's family, not Wateridge. I was preparing to testify. I was in the witness room. They came down and called me. I stood up, adjusted my necktie and started down the hall and they said, stop. We don't need you. And then they reached a plea agreement with Frank Woodrich.

46:51At the last minute, the prosecution suggested that Frank agree to a plea deal, negligent dereliction of duty. All he'd get was a reduction in pay and rank, and he'd walk completely free. The prosecution had engineered the failure of their own case, says lawyer Haitham Faraj. The government paid to have people come in and lie, and the payment was immunity. And that's how they misused the legal process. But ultimately, the conclusion of the Haditha trial also came down to a lack of political will. If this crime had been committed in some base in Germany, I guarantee you the perpetrators would stand trial and be held accountable.

47:31It was in Iraq. We wanted to demonize the Iraqis to justify the crimes that were committed by the politicians that sent Marines abroad, and Marines and others, and so that's the result. We put these allegations to the lead prosecutor at the time, but he didn't respond.

47:54Like Khalid, whose father and uncles were killed in House 4, Safa also has unanswered questions. I ask her if she wants to send a message to squad leader Frank Woodridge. She hesitates and goes to the other room to grab her phone. This is a poem I read. It moved me and I thought it could express my feelings clearer than I can in my own words. It's a poem she's dedicating to all the Marines implicated in her family's killings, she says.

48:26A message to my family's killer. If you knew what you had killed, you wouldn't have killed. You wouldn't have killed. If you knew the burning loss you left inside me, you wouldn't have killed. If you knew what it means to lose your family, you wouldn't have done it. If you knew how the fire you burned us with will one day be returned to you, you wouldn't have killed. The killer will be punished. May God serve justice.

49:13We wanted Frank Woodridge to take part in this story, and to answer Safa and Khaled's questions, or just listen to their messages. After months of back and forth with his lawyer, in the end, he declined to speak to us, or even to listen to the messages Safa and Khaled had sent. Filmmaker Michael Epstein has known Woodridge for nearly 20 years, So how does he think Woodridge now feels about the case? I don't think Frank feels the very intimate responsibility in House 4 that I know he feels in House 2. I know Frank feels that in House 2, it was his fault that that house happened the way it did. It doesn't mean that he is the murderer, but he knows he lost control.

50:07He knows he was in charge. And he knows ultimately that those deaths, those murders, are on him. But through his lawyer, Woodridge did send us a written message for Suffa. An actor is reading what he said. I am still very sorry for how everything unfolded that day. and had I known that day the information I know now, I would have handled the situation very differently. I'm sure she's not interested in me defending my decisions that day, and that is completely understandable. She should know I really wish her and her family the best, and I hate that we have this shared history with one another.

50:46Safa's testimony from when she was 14 was never played at Frank Woodrich's trial. And 20 years later, her message to the one person she thought could give her answers has also gone unheard. The testimonies, the investigation, the trial. Haitham Faraj, Wutrich's lawyer, questions the point of it all. I would tell Khalid and Safa that their impressions of a show trial with no real outcome, with no one being punished, was right. And I was wrong. because I believed that at the time that the system was supposed to work and hold people accountable. I didn't realize at the time that the gravity of this case and its likely impact on the Marine Corps and maybe our politics would result in a complete miscarriage of justice.

51:40Whether deliberate or negligent, you know, I would say that they're right. No one was held accountable. In a statement, the US Marine Corps said it is committed to fair and open proceedings under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, ensuring due process of law. And it said it is not reopening the investigation in this case unless a wealth of new, unexamined and admissible evidence is introduced.

52:19You've been listening to No Justice, Just Kills, a BBC Eye investigation for the documentary for the BBC World Service. I'm Lara El-Gibeli. The producers were me, Namak Khoshnau, and Sophie Eastall. The editors were Simon Cox and Rebecca Henschke. The sound engineer was Gareth Jones. Thanks for listening.

52:46You