A Finnish court on Wednesday acquitted twin Iraqi brothers accused of war crimes over their alleged role in a 2014 massacre of up to 1,700 unarmed recruits by the Islamic State group in Iraq. The court in Tampere, in southwestern Finland, said there was not enough conclusive evidence for a conviction.
The two men, born in 1992, came to Finland as asylum seekers in September 2015 and were arrested three months later. The prosecution had sought life terms in prison for the brothers' alleged role in the massacre of unarmed, mostly Shiite military recruits who were captured outside the Camp Speicher military base near Tikrit in northern Iraq.
One of the two brothers was accused of appearing in a propaganda video later released by IS, where he is seen shooting dead at least 11 prisoners who had been forced to lay down in a pit for execution. The twins look so much alike that the prosecutor was unable to identify which of the two appeared in the video, and had opted to charge them both for an unspecified number of murders. But the court found that the IS propaganda video and the Iraqis who testified against them did not constitute conclusive proof, the Finnish news agency STT reported.