In a significant blow to the Justice Department, a federal judge on Thursday threw out the indictment of four former Blackwater Worldwide security guards over a shooting in Baghdad in 2007 that left 17 Iraqis dead and about 20 more wounded.
In a 90-page opinion, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina wrote that the government’s mishandling of the case “requires dismissal of the indictment against all the defendants.”
In a “reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights,” the judge wrote, investigators, prosecutors and government witnesses had inappropriately relied on statements that the guards had been compelled to make in debriefings by the State Department shortly after the shooting. The State Department had hired the guards to protect its officials.
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