WASHINGTON — An appeals court on Friday resurrected the case against four Blackwater Worldwide guards involved in a 2007 shooting in a Baghdad public square that killed 17 Iraqi citizens.
A federal trial judge in Washington, Ricardo Urbina, threw out the case on New Year’s Eve 2009 after he found the Justice Department mishandled evidence and violated the guards’ constitutional rights.
But a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Friday that Urbina wrongly interpreted the law. It ordered that he reconsider whether there was any tainted evidence against four of the five defendants — former Marines Evan Liberty of Rochester, N.H.; Donald Ball of West Valley City, Utah; and Dustin Heard of Knoxville, Tenn.; and Army veteran Paul Slough from Keller, Texas.
The Justice Department has dismissed charges against the fifth defendant, Nick Slatten, a former Army sergeant from Sparta, Tenn.
Blackwater security contractors were guarding U.S. diplomats when they opened fire in Nisoor Square on Sept. 16, 2007. Seventeen people were killed, including women and children, and 20 others wounded in a shooting that inflamed anti-American sentiment in Iraq.
North Carolina-based Blackwater, which renamed itself Xe Services after the shooting, said the guards were innocent and responding to an insurgent ambush. Prosecutors said the shooting was unprovoked.
After a lengthy investigation, the U.S. Justice Department charged the five contractors with 14 counts of manslaughter and took a guilty plea from a sixth, Jeremy Ridgeway of California, who is cooperating with prosecutors and won’t be sentenced until the case is resolved.
Urbina’s dismissal outraged many Iraqis, who said it showed Americans considered themselves above the law.
Hassan Jabir, a lawyer hit by gunfire in the deadly melee, described the appellate decision as a “big achievement for all those who were hurt by Blackwater’s crime.”
