Scotsman | Feb 05 2005

Comment: Compare this with the story of the Soldier Who Made Iraqis Jump Off a Bridge, Killing One, who got the same amount of jail time and was NOT discharged. Some justice system.

A US soldier who stamped on Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison was last night sentenced to six months in jail and discharged from the army.

Sergeant Javal Davis admitted stepping on the hands and feet of handcuffed prisoners and falling with his full weight on top of them.

The military jury at Fort Hood, Texas, deliberated for nearly six hours. Davis, 27, had faced up to eight-and-a-half years in prison but made a plea deal with prosecutors.

He also pleaded guilty to making a false statement to the army after photographs of naked and abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib were made public last year.

"I am deeply sorry," he told the jury. "I’m not the perfect soldier."

Prosecutor Major Michael Holley said: "These assaults are best characterised by two words: brutal and cowardly."

Davis, from New Jersey, was a guard at the Abu Ghraib prison for three months in late 2003. He is the seventh person to be sentenced over the abuses - six of them admitted their guilt and one, Charles Graner, was convicted in a court martial last month.

Graner - regarded as the ringleader of the abuse scandal - was sentenced to ten years in jail.

The abuse at Abu Ghraib, highlighted in photographs showing naked and injured inmates alongside smiling US troops, sparked international outrage.

Meanwhile, US-backed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi was trailing a Shia party with ties to Iran in Iraq’s historic election, according to partial returns. The United Iraqi Alliance, endorsed by Iraq’s top Shia clerics, captured more than two-thirds of the 3.3 million votes counted so far, the election commission said yesterday. Allawi’s party had about 18 per cent - or more than 579,700 votes.

• Three Iraqi soldiers have been killed in a motorcycle bomb attack in Basra, British military leaders confirmed today.

The booby-trapped vehicle exploded close to the Old State Buildings, in the Al-Hussein district, shortly before 8am local time, as troops carried out patrols.

In the north, another bomb blasted an American patrol, killing two US soldiers and wounding five others last night. That attack occurred near the city of Beiji, about 155 miles north of Baghdad. Another roadside bomb exploded in the same area a few hours earlier, killing one American soldier.