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US SOLDIER AVOIDS DEATH PENALTY FOR RAPE AND MURDER
February 22, 2007: US soldier Paul E Cortez, 24, admitted gang raping and murdering 14-year-old Iraqi girl Abeer Qassim al-Janabi and killing her family in their home in Mahmoudiya, Iraq, last March.
By pleading guilty, he avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to one hundred years in prison.
Cortez said this week that former private Steven D. Green raped the girl before he did. Then Green shot her father, mother and sister before shooting the teen in the head, Cortez said. He also testified that the soldiers tried to burn the girl's body.
They burned their own clothes and threw the murder weapon, an AK-47, into a canal in an effort to dispose of the evidence. (Sources: The Guardian, 23/02/2007)
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