British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace admitted, on Tuesday, that British soldiers committed war crimes in Iraq, but excluded the crime of Iraqi Saeed Shabram, saying it was not a war crime.
The Telegraph stated in a report, that the British Defense Minister clashed with the International Criminal Court because it accused a senior officer in the army of committing the crime for receiving medals, as he put it.
He added that, in an unusual move, Wallace wrote to the attorney general of the court asking him to rewrite and correct a published report that he said that an Iraqi young man was drowned in a water canal by British forces in Iraq in 2003 and that he may be a victim of committing a war crime.
He continued, “The letter sent by the British Defense Secretary puts Britain on a collision course with the International Criminal Court, which is funding it, as three soldiers who committed the crime in Iraq were acquitted by a former British Appeals Court judge after a three-year investigation.”
Those accused by the British court, the International Criminal Court announced that it believed his death was a war crime, and he was one of at least seven Iraqis unlawfully killed while they were in the British detention center in Basra.
Wallace said, “While we admit to committing war crimes by British forces in Iraq, we are also clear that this does not include the death of Saeed Shabram.”
For its part, the Public Prosecutor at the Criminal Court said that he found “a reasonable basis to believe that the crime of premeditated murder took place in a number of incidents, including the crime of Saeed Shabram. However, it stopped its investigations because it was convinced that the British authorities have already conducted full investigations.”
