Lara Elgebali
BBC about investigations
"This is the room where my entire family was killed," says Safa Younes.
Bullet holes cover the front door of the house in the Iraqi town of Haditha, where she grew up.
In the bedroom at the back of the house, colorful bedspreads cover the bed where her family was shot.
This is where she hid with her five sisters and brother, mother and aunt when US Marines stormed their home and opened fire, killing everyone except Safa, on November 19, 2005.
Her father was also killed when he opened the front door.
Now, 20 years later, a BBC Eye investigation has uncovered new evidence implicating two marines, who have never before been brought to justice, in the murder of Safa's family, according to a forensic expert.
The evidence, mostly statements and testimonies given after the murder, cast doubt on the US investigation into what happened that day and raises major questions about how the US armed forces are held accountable.
The killing of Safa's family was part of what became known as the Haditha massacre, when US Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians, including four women and six children.
They broke into three homes, killing almost everyone they found, as well as the driver and four students in the car, who were headed to college.
This incident triggered the longest-running US investigation into war crimes committed in the Iraq War, but no one has been convicted for the killings.
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The Marines said they were responding to gunfire after a roadside bomb exploded, killing one of their squad members and wounding two others.
But Safa, who was 13 at the time, says: "We weren't accused of anything. We didn't even have any weapons in the house."
She survived by playing dead among the small bodies of her sisters and brother, the youngest child being three years old.
"I was the only survivor of my entire family," she says.
Four Marines were initially charged with the murder, but they gave conflicting accounts of the events and eventually US military prosecutors dropped charges against three of them, granting them immunity from further legal action.
After that, the only thing left to do was to put the squad leader - Junior Sergeant Frank Vuterich - on trial in 2012.
In a video recording of the pre-trial proceedings, which has never been broadcast before, the youngest member of the squad, Corporal Humberto Mendoza, is questioned, and in the recording he reconstructs the events in Safa's house.
Mendoza, who was a private at the time and was never charged, admits to killing Safa's father when he opened the front door to the Marines.
"Did you see his hands?" the lawyer asks him.
"Yes, sir," Mendoza replies, confirming that Safa's father was not armed.
"But you still shot him?" the lawyer asks.
"Yes, sir," Mendoza replies.
In his official statements, Mendoza initially claimed that, after entering the house, he opened the door to the bedroom where Safa and her family were, but when he saw that only women and children were inside, he did not enter, instead closing the door.
However, in a newly discovered audio recording from the Vuterich trial, Mendoza tells a different story.
He says he went 2,4 feet into the bedroom.
This is of extreme importance, according to forensic expert Michael Maloney.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service sent him to Haditha in 2006 to investigate the murders, and he examined the bedroom where Safa's family was murdered.
Using crime scene photographs taken by Marines at the time of the murders, he concluded that two Marines entered the room and killed the women and children.
When we played him the recording of Mendoza saying he had entered the room, Maloney said, "This is fantastic to me, what we're hearing now, I've never heard it before today."
He said that according to the video, Mendoza positioned himself exactly in the position where Maloney concluded the first shooter was standing, at the head of the bed.
"If you were to ask me, 'Is this some kind of confession?' I would tell you, 'Mendoza basically confessed to everything except pulling the trigger.'"
Safa gave a video statement to military prosecutors in 2006, but it was never shown in court.
In it, she described how a Marine who opened the bedroom door threw in a grenade, which did not explode, and then the same man entered the room and shot the family.
Mendoza is the only Marine who ever said he opened the door.
Another Marine, Lance Corporal Steven Tatum, did not deny taking part in the killings, but said he followed squad leader Wuterich into the bedroom and initially claimed he did not know the women and children were there due to poor visibility.
But in three subsequent statements obtained by the BBC, Tatum gave different testimony.
"I saw that there were children kneeling in the room. I don't remember the exact number of them, only that there were a lot of them. I was trained to fire two shots to the chest and two to the head, and I followed the training," Tatum told the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in April 2006.
A month later, he said he "was able to positively identify the people in the room as women and children before he shot them."
And then, a week later, he said, "There I saw the child I shot. I knew it was a child, and I shot him anyway."
He described the child as wearing a white short-sleeved T-shirt, standing on a bed, and having short hair.
Tatum's lawyers argued that these later statements were made under duress.
The charges against Tatum were dropped in March 2008, and the testimony was disregarded at Wuterich's trial.
Forensic expert Michael Maloney said that the statements of Mendoza and Tatum point to the two as the Marines who killed Safa's family.
He believes Mendoza entered the bedroom first, and Tatum followed him "shooting over the headboard."
We made these allegations to Mendoza and Tatum.
Mendoza didn't answer.
He previously admitted to shooting Safa's father, but claimed he was following orders.
No criminal charges were ever filed against him.
Through his lawyer, Tatum said he wanted to leave Haditha behind.
He never retracted his statement that he was one of the shooters at Safa's house.
Maloney told the BBC that the prosecution "wanted Vuterich to be the primary shooter."
But before Maloney could testify, Wutherich's trial ended with a plea bargain.
Vuterich insisted that he did not remember what happened at Safa's house and agreed to a plea bargain on one count of negligent dereliction of duty - a charge unrelated to any direct involvement in the murders.
Wutherich's military lawyer, Haitham Faraj, himself a former Marine, said the sentence was "a slap on the wrist... like a speeding ticket."
Neil Puckett, Wuttrich's lead lawyer, said the entire investigation and prosecution of his client was "contrived."
"That prosecution, by granting immunity to all witnesses and dismissing all their charges, has effectively rendered itself incapable of achieving any justice in this case," he said.
Haitham Farage agreed that the entire process was deeply flawed.
"The government paid people to come forward and lie, and the payment was immunity, and they abused the legal process," he told the BBC.
"The Haditha trial was never intended to give a voice to the victims," he added.
He said that "the survivors' impression that it was a staged trial without a real outcome, without anyone being punished, was correct."
The U.S. Marine Corps told us it is committed to fair and open proceedings under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which ensures due process.
They added that they would not reopen the investigation unless a wealth of new, unexplored and admissible evidence emerged.
The lead prosecutor in the case did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.
Now 33 years old, Safa still lives in Haditha and has three children.
She says she can't understand how no Marine was punished for the death of her family.
When we showed her the video of Mendoza, she said that "he should have been locked up from the moment the incident happened, he should have been prevented from seeing the light of day."
"It's like it all happened last year. I still think about it," she says of the day her family was killed.
"I want those who did this to be held accountable and punished according to the law. It's been almost 20 years without them being tried. This is a real crime."
Additional reporting: Namak Hoschnau and Michael Epstein
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