'This Was Murder,' Says Judge, Sentencing Ex-Blackwater Guard to Life for Nisour Square Massacre

Rejecting claims from defense attorneys and family members that U.S. prosecutors scapegoated former Blackwater security guard Nicholas Slatten to improve U.S.-Iraqi relations, a federal judge sentenced former Blackwater security guard Nicholas Slatten to life in prison Wednesday for his role in the notorious 2007 Nisour Square massacre.

“The jury got it exactly right,” Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for D.C. reportedly said while issuing the sentence. “This was murder.”

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Paul Dickinson, an attorney who represented families of six massacre victims—including 9-year-old Ali Kinani—welcomed the sentence in a series of tweets Wednseday evening, declaring that “justice prevails” for his clients.

U.S. prosecutors charged that on Sept. 16, 2007, Slatten fired the first shots into a crowded Baghdad traffic circle, killing 19-year-old Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia’y and setting off a flurry of machine gun and grenade fire that left 14 Iraqi civilians dead and over a dozen more injured.

“Several of Slatten’s supporters openly accused prosecutors of scapegoating an innocent man in order to placate Iraqi public opinion,” The Associated Press reported. “The shootings strained U.S.-Iraqi relations and focused intense international scrutiny on the extensive use of private military contractors in Iraq.”

As journalist Jeremy Scahill detailed in his book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, the company, “founded by secretive right-wing Christian supremacist Erik Prince…had deep ties to the Bush administration and served as a sort of neoconservative Praetorian Guard for a borderless war launched in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.”