He was found not guilty of all charges but the one stemming from the photos he and fellow SEAL team members took with the dead ISIL fighter, who was brought to Gallagher’s camp by an Iraqi general after being badly wounded in an air attack. Gallagher also was charged with attempted murder in the wounding of two unarmed civilians – a schoolgirl and an elderly man – shot from a sniper’s perch, as well as with firing deliberately on other non-combatants and with obstruction of justice. Some of the same witnesses also said they saw Gallagher, who was originally trained as a medic, perform a number of emergency procedures on the detainee before he died. Several fellow SEAL team members testified he fatally stabbed the captured Iraqi prisoner in the neck with a custom-made knife after the teenage fighter was brought to Gallagher’s outpost for medical treatment. Gallagher could have faced life in prison if found guilty of the most serious charge against him, premeditated murder. The jury found Gallagher “not guilty of murder, not guilty of stabbing, not guilty of shooting, not guilty of all those things, they found him guilty of taking a photograph,” Timothy Parlatore, one of Gallagher’s lawyer’s, told journalists outside the court. The maximum sentence he could face is four months’ imprisonment, meaning he is set to walk free following Tuesday’s military court verdict on account of the nine months he has already served in pre-trial confinement. A decorated US Navy SEAL was found not guilty on Tuesday of murdering a captive teenage fighter in Iraq, the most serious of the charges brought against him during a two-week war crimes trial in San Diego in the United States.Įdward Gallagher, 49, was likewise acquitted of two counts of attempted murder against Iraqi civilians but was convicted of posing for a photograph beside the corpse of the captive Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ( ISIL/ISIS) group fighter.
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