An ex-US soldier accused of raping a young Iraqi woman and killing four family members including the rape victim, is among many US troops in Iraq with mental or personality disorders, CNN Television reported yesterday.

 

Quoting military documents, the report said Steven D. Green was discharged from the military and sent home in May due to some "anti-social personality disorder," before the rape and killing incident was exposed in June.

 

Several other US soldiers involved in the case have been locked up inside a military base in Iraq, the US military said. Green, 21, was charged in a court in North Carolina Monday with rape and murder charges and was then transferred to Kentucky for a trial that begins next Monday. He could face death penalty if convicted.

 

Prosecutors said Green and several other soldiers targeted a young Iraqi woman after spotting her at a traffic checkpoint near Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad.

 

On March 12, Green and his accomplices allegedly broke into the woman's house. He first killed her parents and a younger sister, who is about five years old, and then raped and murdered the woman. Although the revelation of Green's personality disorder won't help him to get away with the punishment, it exposes a prevailing cause for war atrocities by US soldiers in Iraq, -- the mental and personality disorder.

 

In the area southwest of Baghdad where Green was once stationed, over 40 percent of the nearly 1,000 US soldiers there have been treated for mental or emotional anxiety. Green was apparently one of them.

 

(Xinhua News Agency July 7, 2006)