US soldier ‘methodical’ in Iraq clinic shooting spree, says expert

A US soldier who killed five fellow servicemen in a shooting spree at a combat stress centre in Iraq acted with the tactical precision of a trained soldier as he moved through the clinic, an Army crime scene expert testified on Thursday.

US Army Sergeant John Russell pleaded guilty last month to killing two medical staff officers and three soldiers at Camp Liberty in Baghdad in a 2009 shooting the military has said could have been triggered by combat stress.

Russell faces an abbreviated court-martial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, where a military judge will determine the level of his guilt. Russell’s sentence will hinge on whether he acted with premeditation, as prosecutors say, or on impulse, as the defence argues.

An Army forensic science officer on scene after the attack testified on Thursday in the fourth day of court-martial proceedings that Russell had acted with tactical precision.

In one instance, the expert said, Russell avoided a splotch of blood next to a victim that his boots would have tracked about the room. In another, after taking two wayward head shots at a fleeing clinic worker, Russell dropped to his knee, bringing his “sight picture down to centre mass like a good soldier” and fired again upon the worker, who survived.

“[This was] a deliberate, methodical, complex hunt throughout the building, sir,” said Phillip Curran, an Operations Officer in the 11th Military Police Battalion, also known as the Criminal Investigation Command.

“There was nothing disorganised about it,” Curran said.