The head of an Iraqi group that has accused US Marines of killing civilians in Haditha dismissed suggestions on Friday that his human rights organisation lacks credibility and has links to insurgents.
"We are a small group working under difficult conditions to show what is happening in Iraq," said Abdul Rahman al-Mashhadani of Hammurabi Human Rights and Democracy Monitoring.
"None of us have any ties to insurgents." Lawyers for Marines will question the authenticity of a videotape at the heart of the case and the credibility of Hammurabi, which provided it, sources close to the Marines say.
The videotape, given to Time Magazine in January by Hammurabi, shows a number of corpses and purports to show the aftermath of a massacre. It prompted military probes into the November 19 incident in which as many as 24 people died.
Mashhadani said it was some weeks before he handed the tape to Time after failing to interest Iraqi newspapers and Arab television stations in the story. Journalists at satellite channels Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera said they never saw the tape.
Time, in its first report in March which brought the case to public attention, said the tape was made by a journalism student the day after the incident and said Hammurabi was working with Human Rights Watch. It later issued a correction saying the New York-based group had no ties with Hammurabi.
The Marine sources also said defence lawyers would say the man described by Time as the journalism student, 43-year-old Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi, was a founder of Hammurabi and one of only two employees. Mashhadani said Hadithi was taking courses in journalism and was not one of the group's two founders.
Hadithi, based in his native Haditha in Anbar province, was one of six board members, Mashhadani said, adding that the group had 10 other administrative staff in 14 local offices.
Countering a remark by a lawyer for one of the Marines that Hammurabi lacked credibility and only had two employees, he added: "We have volunteers across Iraq."
In the sectarian atmosphere of Iraq, the religious affiliations of the group's representatives are under scrutiny.
Mashhadani, an economics professor in Baghdad, is a Sunni Arab from Balad, north of the capital, and his group has focused its activities over the past year on restive Sunni areas north and west of the city, including Anbar province in the west.
It has Shias and others among some 500 people who work on a voluntary basis for the group, however, Mashhadani said. It is expanding into Shi'ite southern Iraq, he added.
Some 9,000 people monitored last December's election for Hammurabi, which is named after a Babylonian king renowned for establishing one of the world's first legal codes in Iraq.
Mashhadani said he first thought of forming a human rights group when, during a visit to Jordan, he heard reports of fraud in Iraq's first post-war elections in January 2005: "I wanted to investigate these allegations and go all over the country. "An associate and I were in Amman and a human rights activist encouraged us to set it up."
He never thought the Haditha tape would trigger such a major US investigation into the allegations of misconduct by troops because "many cases are never investigated". But all the attention makes him nervous. Mashhadani moves around from house to house, fearful of being targeted. "You never know who will want to kill you in Iraq," he said. Responding to suggestions he and Hadithi have relatives in jail for insurgent activity, Mashhadani said: "Absolutely not."
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