JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. — A U.S. Army soldier accused of exhorting his bored underlings to slaughter three civilians for sport was convicted of murder, conspiracy and all other charges Thursday in one of the most gruesome war-crimes cases to emerge from the Afghan war.
Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs of Billings, Mont., was the highest ranking of five soldiers charged in the deaths of the unarmed men during patrols in Kandahar province early last year. At his seven-day court-martial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle, the 26-year-old acknowledged cutting fingers off corpses and yanking out a victim’s tooth to keep as war trophies, “like keeping the antlers off a deer you’d shoot.” But he insisted he wasn’t involved in the first or third killings, and in the second he merely returned fire.
Prosecutors said Gibbs and his co-defendants knew the victims posed no danger but dropped weapons by their bodies to make them appear to have been combatants.
Gibbs could face a life sentence without parole.
