Feds intend to charge Seattle man for Iraq death

Federal prosecutors intend to charge a former contractor with Blackwater USA in the killing of an Iraqi security guard in 2006, his lawyer said Tuesday.

Attorney Stewart Riley said he received a letter from prosecutors outlining their intent to charge his client, Andrew Moonen, 28, of Seattle. Riley declined to discuss the letter any further or say if it revealed what charge the U.S. attorney's office is contemplating, but he said he has neither received nor made any plea offer on behalf of his client.

Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Seattle, declined to comment Tuesday.

Moonen, a former Army Ranger, was wandering drunk around Baghdad's Green Zone after a Christmas Eve party in 2006 when he encountered and fatally shot Raheem Khalif, a 32-year-old guard to Iraqi Vice President Adil Abd-al-Mahdi, according to a congressional report. He reported the shooting at a nearby post for another security contractor, Triple Canopy, saying he had been in a gunfight with Iraqis.

Blackwater arranged to have the State Department fly him back to the United States, fired him and fined him, and paid the slain guard's family $15,000.

That outraged many Iraqis, who questioned how an American could kill someone in those circumstances and return to the U.S. a free man. By U.S. order, security contractors - at the time, at least - were immune from Iraqi law.

Riley said he continues to investigate and does not expect any formal developments to be brought before March.

The U.S. attorney's office in Seattle has been weighing Moonen's case for the past two years, spending much of that time reviewing whether U.S. courts would have jurisdiction, and the Justice Department sent a team of four prosecutors and an FBI agent to Iraq last summer to investigate.

A similar jurisdictional analysis occurred in the in the case of Blackwater contractors who opened fire in Baghdad's Nisoor Square in 2007, killing at least 14 Iraqi civilians. Last month, federal prosecutors in Washington won indictments on manslaughter and other charges against five Blackwater guards involved in the shooting.

The five guards were to appear for arraignment Tuesday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.