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In this courtroom sketch, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, lower left, watches testimony from a man named Faizullah, on a video monitor at upper left, sitting next to a translator. At right is military prosecutor Lt. Col. Jay Morse. | Lois Silver/AP
The Afghan children awakened in the dead of night with a terrifying warning: An American soldier was in their village, and he had shot at least one man to death.
“He killed my man,” their neighbor’s wife cried as she ran into their home. Sadiqullah, 13, hid behind a curtain. His older brother, Quadratullah, shouted “We are children! We are children!” only to see the soldier shoot his sister.
Haji Mohammed Naim, the father of the household, saw the American approach and asked, “What are you doing?”
The soldier shot him at close range, “here, here and here,” Naim testified early Saturday, gesturing to wounds in his neck and upper torso.
Naim and his sons were among 13 Afghan witnesses testifying from Afghanistan’s Kandahar province over the past two nights in an extraordinary judicial hearing weighing evidence against Joint Base Lewis-McChord’s Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who allegedly murdered 16 Afghan civilians and wounded six more in a nighttime rampage March 11. Bales could face the death penalty if his case proceeds to a court-martial.
The Afghan victims and their relatives gave haunting accounts of violence in Naim’s home in the village of Alkozai and the aftermath of another slaughter Bales allegedly committed in the village of Najiban.
One child, 7-year-old Robina, said she saw her father shot to death right in front of her, taking bullets to the neck and chest. She said she hid behind Nazar Mohamed and was shot in the knee herself.
“I didn’t realize I was shot until later,” said the small girl wrapped in a red scarf. The chatty girl said she’s fine now, describing months of recuperation.
Bales watched the Afghan testimony intently Friday and Saturday, alternating between a television screen showing the testimony from Kandahar and another on a laptop at his table.
His wife, Kari, also attended the hearing. She has sat behind him every day in court, taking notes with supporters and occasionally exchanging glances with her husband.
The Afghans testified on the fifth and sixth days of the evidence hearing over a video link that piped their testimony into a Lewis-McChord courtroom from Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar. Their testimony came in clearly, with attorneys in both countries interacting with witnesses and interpreters.
They described a shooter terrorizing children in Naim’s home and a grisly scene in Najiban where they discovered a pile of burned corpses.
“This is my request: justice,” said Mullah Khamal Adin, who lost 11 relatives in Najiban.
Another 7-year-old girl testifying late Saturday, Zardana, represented a kind of miracle. She was shot in the head in Naim’s home and nearly died on the night of the killings.
The military sent her and her father to her a Navy hospital in San Diego, where she recuperated for three months. She took the witness stand limping but smiling, her head wrapped in a purple scarf.
“I’m not going to lie,” she said when she was briefly sworn in.
Several times, the Afghan witnesses described stunning scenes of depravity, such as 14-year-old Rafiullah’s recollection of an American soldier walking into his house in Alkozai. Rafiullah is Zardana’s brother.
The soldier “came, he put a pistol in my sister’s mouth and then my grandmother started wrestling with him,” said Rafiullah, who was shot in his legs that night. He saw the soldier shoot his grandmother, Nikmarghah, to death.
Adin was not a witness to the massacre, but he collected the corpses of his family members when villagers called him and told him that something terrible had happened in the home of his cousin, Haji Mohammed Wazir.
Adin, 39, found an uncle’s wife, Shatara, shot to death at the entrance.
“When I grabbed her, half of her head fell down and her eyes fell on the ground,” he said.
He moved into another room where he found the pile of naked, burned corpses. Seven of the bodies belonged to children younger than 15. Four were children younger than 5. Several of the young ones had boot marks on their faces.
He speculated that someone threw 2-year-old Palwasha on the fire while the child was still alive.
“They were all shot in their heads,” Adin said. “Their brains were still on their pillows.”
Adin testified in a stoic manner, tilting his head slightly for an hour on the witness stand. He wore traditional Afghan clothing, a turban and a formal shalwar khameez shirt.
He recounted how he separated the males from the females in the pile, then took their bodies to Bales’ combat outpost – Village Stability Platform Belambay. There, villagers from Najiban protested the massacre before burying the bodies.
Adin said his cousin, Wazir, was away on the night of the killings. He gave away his belongings rather than stay in his family compound where he lost six children. He is now in Mecca for an Islamic pilgrimage.
Wazir “left everything behind and he has never come to the compound again,” Adin said.
Defense attorneys were gentle with Adin. Bales’ lead attorney, John Henry Browne, began his questioning by saying, “I am sorry for your loss.”
The trend continued through both nights of Afghan testimony, with defense attorneys respectfully asking questions to determine whether more Americans could have been involved and discern how much coaching they might have received from Army prosecutors and investigators.
Bales allegedly made two forays out of Belambay. First he reportedly walked to Alkozai, killing four people and wounding three in Naim’s family, and second to Najiban, killing Adin’s relatives.
Prosecutors on Friday night called three witnesses who said they saw an American soldier in Alkozai shooting up Naim’s household. Naim first saw the American when the soldier jumped a wall with a rifle and a blinding flashlight.
Naim’s testimony grew forceful at times. His sons spoke more quietly. The boys smiled shyly when they swore an oath to tell the truth.
Sadiquallah is a soft-spoken 13-year-old who was shot in the ear on the night of the killings. He fidgeted through his testimony and frequently looked at the ground while he answered questions through an interpreter.
He said he hid behind a curtain while the American soldier shot up his home. Quadratullah is a year or so older than Sadiquallah. He escaped injury March 11 but saw Rafiullah’s grandmother being shot to death.
“We kept saying, ‘We are children, we are children,’” Quadratullah remembered. “Then he shot, he shot one of the children.”
Quadratullah spoke more confidently than his younger brother. He grabbed a neighbor’s motorcycle after the attack and alerted an older brother about the violence in their father’s home.
The brother, Faizullah, gathered five wounded villagers at the house and took them to a nearby American forward base for medical care.
In the morning, Quadratullah found footprints from what he assumed was the American soldier who attacked his home. They led back to an American outpost, he said.
Staff Sgt. Robert Bales didn’t act alone, attorneys suggest
The Army contends Bales carried out the killings by himself in two separate trips out of his combat outpost, Village Stability Platform Belambay, in the early hours of March 11 — first to the village of Alkozai and then to the village of Najiban.
Bales, a 39-year-old former Lake Tapps resident, is in court at Joint Base Lewis-McChord for a evidence hearing that could lead to a death-penalty court-martial. He spent his entire Army career at Lewis-McChord, and served on four combat tours with the same Stryker brigade.
Prosecutors over the past week have called on several of Bales’ alleged victims who insisted they saw only one shooter, as well as Bales’ fellow soldiers who testified he was the only person missing from their ranks at Belambay on the night of the killings.
Bales’ defense team, however, has plenty of material to suggest that multiple soldiers participated in the killings.
“One person cannot do this work,” said Maj. Khudai Dad, an Afghan officer who investigated the killings the morning after they took place.
He testified via a video link from Kandahar Province late Sunday. He did not have evidence to support his argument, only a contention that one person could not kill so many people in separate villages.
He conceded that he spent only an hour in the two villages.
Better evidence could come from Masooma, the widow of a man killed in Najiban. She told an Army Criminal Investigative Command agent in June that she saw two American soldiers enter her home, shout about the Taliban, take her husband Mohammed Dawood outside and execute him with a pistol to his head.
Mohammed Dawood’s widow told 1st Agent Leona Mansapit that she overheard multiple Americans speaking English in the compounds around her home. The widow also reported hearing helicopters overhead and seeing multiple flares shot in the sky.
Mansapit, who presented Masooma’s version of events in court Sunday, said she had no reason to doubt the credibility of the widow.
No other witnesses in the past week of testimony have described helicopters near Najiban that night. Several American soldiers have said they shot flares called illumination rounds in the sky when they heard gunfire about 1:30 a.m. on March 11 and again about 3:30 a.m. when they realized Bales was missing.
Masooma did not testify at Bales’ evidence hearing. Her family does not want her to testify because she is a woman, a Lewis-McChord official said.
“We’re still trying to bridge that gap,” the official said.
Instead, her brother-in-law, Mullah Baraan, spoke for her. He insisted that she told him only one soldier attacked her home.
“I talked to my brother’s wife and I had her tell me exactly what happened,” he said.
Bales’ defense attorney, John Henry Browne, asked if Baraan had received a $50,000 payment from the U.S. government. Baraan confirmed that he had, to take care of the children, he said. That’s the sum the U.S. has given to relatives of each of Bales’ alleged victims.
One key piece of prosecution evidence would make it difficult for Bales’ defense team to demonstrate that multiple soldiers were in the village of Najiban.
A surveillance video recorded about 4:30 a.m. that day shows a single, caped figure walking from the direction of Najiban to Belambay. The figure turns himself in to two American soldiers at Belambay’s gate. Those soldiers have testified that they apprehended an armed and bloodied Bales wearing some sort of cape that morning.
Several children who testified via video link from Kandahar said they saw lights around their homes, as if other soldiers were outside. One young girl wounded in Alkozai also said she saw multiple lights that night. But Robina, 7, said “I saw one guy who came inside the home.”
Last week, a U.S. soldier testified that he and three other junior soldiers at Bales’ outpost approached an Army criminal investigator with a theory that a second sergeant was involved in the killings. They based their speculation on reports from an Afghan guard that two Americans walked into Belambay late on the night of the killings, and one American left the base about 3 a.m.
The junior soldiers fingered a sergeant who was close to Bales. They were concerned that he appeared to have showered and shaved the night of the massacre when commanders checked to see who was missing from Belambay. That was conspicuous to the junior soldier who testified because soldiers at the outpost had been growing beards, and the sergeant should have had a month’s worth of growth on his face.
The Army investigated the sergeant, seizing his clothes and taking photographs of him. The only blood on the sergeant’s clothes was his own, a DNA examiner testified last week. Also, he had a full beard in a photograph taken of him two days after the killings.
In other testimony over the weekend, an Afghan teenager who suffered a gunshot wound to his leg testified from Kandahar that he saw one American soldier that night.
Browne reminded the boy, named Rafiullah, that he has told another one of Bales’ defense attorneys that multiple soldiers were in the fields around his home. On Saturday, Rafiullah distanced himself from that statement.
“I might have told (the defense attorney) that, but I don’t remember,” he said.
After seven straight days of court action and three consecutive late-night sessions to accommodate witnesses in southern Afghanistan’s time zone, there is no court action today. Bales’ hearing is scheduled to resume Tuesday morning.
