LONDON, Feb 13, (Agencies): Eight Iraqis are to be tried over the killings of six British military police officers in a remote town in Iraq in 2003, the Ministry of Defence said on Friday.
The six officers, members of a unit known as the “Red Caps”, died in June 2003 in Majjar when angry residents stormed a police station.
Britain joined a US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein.
A Ministry of Defence spokesman said an Iraqi judge had indicated there was enough evidence to put on trial eight suspects currently in custody in Iraq.
“The UK government is committed to seeing the killers of the six Royal Military Police personnel brought to justice,” the ministry said in a statement.
“We are assisting the Iraqi government in every way possible to secure convictions, including access to UK investigative materials and expertise.”
The British military said at the time that the deaths stemmed from a misunderstanding between troops and residents over weapons searches.
The incident caused an outcry in Britain after reports that the men had been killed in cold blood by a mob rather than in combat.
Families of the six were critical of the British government for passing the investigation over to the Iraqi authorities, and argued that negligence by army personnel led to their deaths.
An inquest into the killings in March 2006 found the men had poor communications equipment and inadequate ammunition. But the coroner ruled the deaths could not have been avoided.
Reg Keys, whose son Corporal Thomas Keys was killed in the attack, said he was hopeful convictions could be secured within the next few months.
But he was critical of the time it had taken to bring the alleged killers to justice.
“The bodies were looted, my son’s watch was taken,” he told Sky News.
“We’ve known now for nearly seven years ... that these alleged killers walked the streets wearing the trophies from the six Red Caps.”

Campaign
A political coalition led by one of the Iraqi prime minister’s fiercest critics temporarily halted its campaign Saturday for next month’s parliamentary elections after a number of its candidates were barred from running.
The Iraqi National Movement, led by former Shiite premier Ayad Allawi, suspended campaigning for three days while it attempts to negotiate the return of dozens of its candidates, said spokesman Haydar al-Mulla.
The back-and-forth political wrangling over the ban on more than 450 candidates for the March 7 vote has threatened to undermine Iraq’s political stability, worrying US officials that it could throw the credibility of the elections into question and undo security gains.
Al-Mulla said it was unclear how many of the coalition’s have been banned from running, but said election officials initially put the number at 72.
The biggest blow to the group was the loss of one of its leaders, Sunni lawmaker Saleh al-Mutlaq. Al-Mutlaq — a fierce critic of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — has acknowledged he was a Baathist until the late 1970s but quit the party. A panel confirmed the ban on al-Mutlaq earlier this week.
Al-Mutlaq and other Sunnis leaders have slammed the blacklist as an attempt by al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government to sideline Sunnis, even though many Shiites have also been banned.
More than 450 candidates were identified on a backlist by a Shiite-led political vetting committee. All but 177 candidates either dropped out on their own or were replaced by their party.
The election commission chief, Faraj al-Haidari, said an appeals panel only cleared 26 names on the blacklist to run.
US officials are deeply concerned that the ban could undermine Iraq’s political stability ahead of the withdrawal of American combat troops by the end of August.

Threat
The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, threatened in an audio recording Friday to stop Iraqi parliamentary elections by “military means,” the SITE monitoring service said.
SITE, which monitors Islamist websites, said Baghdadi condemned the March 7 elections as a political crime plotted by Shiites.
“(We) have decided to prevent the elections by all legitimate means possible, primarily by military means,” the service quoted him as saying.
The speech, which runs 34 minutes and 22 seconds and was produced by the group’s media arm, al-Furqan, was posted on jihadist websites on Friday, SITE said.
The election is seen by Washington as a crucial precursor to a complete US military withdrawal by the end of 2011.
There are currently 107,000 US troops in Iraq, but the number is scheduled to fall to 50,000 by August when all American combat soldiers are due to pull out.
Around 19 million people have the right to vote, including 1.4 million Iraqi citizens now living abroad in 16 countries, according to election organizers.
A total of 6,500 candidates will contest the ballot in an election that will feature 10,000 polling stations and 54,000 ballot boxes, according to Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC).