IN A REPORT published Wednesday in the Miami Herald and other Knight Ridder newspapers, Bakhat Hassan said American soldiers had waved his family’s car through a checkpoint as they left their village Monday. But at the next checkpoint, the soldiers fired.
“We were thinking these Americans want us to be safe,” Hassan, 35, said through a translator.
Hassan, interviewed Tuesday by a Knight Ridder correspondent at the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital near Najaf, said 11 members of his family were killed in the incident — his daughters, ages 2 and 5, his son, 3, his parents, two older brothers, their wives and two nieces, ages 12 and 15.
His wife, Lamea, who is nine months pregnant, said she saw her children die.
“I saw the heads of my two little girls come off,” said Lamea Hassan, 36. “My girls — I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead.”
U.S. officials originally said seven were killed; reporters at the scene placed the death toll at 10. Hassan’s father later died at the Army hospital. A brother who is being treated there may not survive, a doctor said.
Another brother, a sister-in-law and a 7-year-old child were released to bury the dead.
