Entered into the database on Friday, July 29th, 2005 @ 15:20:07 MST
Latest information about the death of an Iraqi journalist who was investigating
the activities of the death squads in Iraq, shows he was shot with his hands
up in a scene which resembles an assassination zone. Knight-Ridder reporter, Yasser Salihee, 30, was killed on June 24, 2005 while
on his for gasoline to bring his family to the swimming pool. He came into a
Baghdad road intersection where every exit had been blocked
by U.S. Humvees. He died of a single shot to the head. A propaganda report
by Salon.com, which interviews the supposed sniper --but does not identify him--
paints the incident as an unpremiditated, accidental killing. But details of
the scene and the events now revealed have the hallmarks of a staged assassination. At the time Salihee entered the intersection, all other exits
were blocked. And as he approached, another car already in place began 'turning'
in front of Salihee to bring him to a halt in the killing zone and ensure a
perfect shot. The windshield of his car appears to be pierced by only one
bullet -the fatal one. Four fingers of his right hand were missing -possibly
in vain self-defense. The victim and the killer Yasser Salihee was an Iraqi journalist. Joe was an American sniper. On June 24, 2005, fate brought them together on a Baghdad street. By Phillip Robertson ...Falah Hassan Jasim, a plumber who was standing on the south side of the
street when the shooting happened, told me, "There was a Lada
car turning in the road and he [Salihee] tried to pass it,
and then he pulled over. The Americans shot him, they were standing in the middle
of the street." According to Hassan, Salihee was stopped with his
hands up when the snipers fired at him. I asked Hassan about the interval
between the shots and he said, "It was like this, pop, pop, pop,"
saying the bullets were fired in less than a few seconds. Another witness, Hamid Mohammed Aboud, a 25-year-old ice seller who works at
the corner of Amel Al Shabi and Rafaee streets, said, "Both Americans were
firing at the same time, the shots were very close together." Was Salihee's car stopped? There does not appear to be definitive proof one
way or the other. Ayman Salihee, Yasser's younger brother, said that when he
arrived at the intersection, he saw that the Espero's transmission was in
neutral and that his brother's feet were on the brake.
In the police report, a diagram shows that Salihee's car was pulled all the
way over to the left side of the street, parallel to the curb. The evidence suggests that Salihee might have had his hands raised. Four
fingers on Salihee's right hand were missing. Although it's possible
that a bullet other than the fatal bullet caused the injury (there were conflicting
stories that an Iraqi soldier might also have fired), the missing fingers and
the angle of fire are consistent with a bullet striking a raised hand. The details may be murky, but in retrospect it is fairly clear what happened.
The real problem was that the platoon did not put out cones and wire -- if they
had Yasser would have stopped. Then came the fateful turning car, followed by
another car coming around it. The soldiers were on edge, but they seem to have
followed their rules of engagement. It was a typical misunderstanding,
of the sort that happens all the time in Iraq.
