MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

US contractor accused of shooting civilians

Four security guards have claimed that their former employer, hired by the US Government, has arbitrarily killed Iraqi civilians.
"These aren't insurgents that we're brutalising," one of the guards, Bill Craun, a retired US Army Ranger captain, told NBC.
"It was local civilians on their way to work. It's wrong."
Mr Craun and three others said their former employer, Custer Battles, allowed heavily armed guards to roam Iraq brutalising civilians while they were supposed to be guarding supply convoys from rebels.
Custer Battles was the subject of a Senate Democratic Party committee hearing this week into allegations of corruption in Iraq.
A lawyer for the four said the firm was paid millions of dollars for work not done because of the owners' connections with the Republican Party.
The four former employees said their convoys fired on pedestrians and crushed children with a truck. The men claimed a Kurdish guard travelling with them fired into a passenger car to move traffic out of the way.
Ernest Colling, a former army corporal said the bullet "went through the window. As far as I could see, it hit a passenger."
Mr Colling said that later that day, an Iraqi teenager walking on the roadside was shot. "The rear gunner in my vehicle shot him," he said. "Unarmed, walking kids."
A Ford utility truck crushed a smaller car with Iraqis inside."I could see two children sitting in the back seat of that car with their eyes looking up at the axle as it came down and pulverised the back," Mr Craun said.
Another guard, Will Hough, a retired US marine, said it was unlikely anyone survived. "Probably not. Not from what I saw."