Iraq court sentences 40 to death over 2014 Tikrit massacre

An Iraqi court on Thursday sentenced 40 men to death over the June 2014 massacre by jihadists and allied militants of hundreds of military recruits in Tikrit, a statement said.

The central criminal court in Baghdad found 40 of 47 defendants guilty of involvement in the “Speicher” massacre, named after the base near where the victims were captured before being executed.

“The court ordered the execution of 40 (people) convicted of involvement in the incident, while seven were released for lack of evidence,” the spokesman for Iraq’s judiciary, Abdel Sattar Bayraqdar, said in the statement.

He did not say how many were present at the trial and provided no details on each defendant’s involvement in the Speicher massacre, nor on the circumstances of their arrest.

Bayraqdar said the sentences were handed down in accordance with Article Four of Iraq’s anti-terrorism law, which states that anyone who perpetrates, incites, plans, finances or assists acts of terrorism will be sentenced to death.

In a similar trial in July 2015, 24 men were sentenced to hang over the Speicher massacre, which was committed during the first days of the Islamic State group’s broad offensive in Iraq.

All of them had denied involvement. Some had said they were not even near Tikrit at the time, others that they never saw a lawyer and that the confessions used to secure convictions were obtained under torture.

Rights groups had criticized the trial as not meeting many of the standards required for such crimes.

A year after the massacre, the Islamic State jihadist group released footage showing hundreds of executions, providing further evidence of the scope of the atrocity.

In the 22-minute video posted on jihadist forums in July 2014, some of the victims are shown pleading for their lives, attempting to explain they had only just joined the security forces.

The grisly footage shows executions on an industrial scale, with victims falling out of dump trucks and later lying side by side in shallow mass graves before being shot dead one by one.

The killing went on into the night and the video shows an excavator being used to move piles of bodies.

Around 600 bodies have been exhumed since government and allied fighters retook Tikrit from IS last year, but many of the victims were dumped into the Tigris river.

The highest estimate for the number of men murdered in the Speicher massacre is 1,700. Tikrit was retaken from IS in April 2015.