Does anybody here remember Mitrovica?
I am referring specifically to the April 2004 shootout at a jail in Mitrovica, located in northern Kosovo (Serbia), between Jordanian and American UN peacekeepers. One Jordanian was killed and two Americans, Kim Bigley and Lynn Williams, were killed during the gun battle. Another American peacekeeper, Gary Weston, died a days later from his head wounds. Ten other people were injured, including an Austrian.
One police force member said the Americans were leaving the prison in a bus, when the Jordanian officer opened fire on them.
An eyewitness quoted by the Associated Press news agency said he heard gunshots followed by the cries of American officers yelling, "Drop the gun! Drop the gun!"
The United Nations, whose UNMIK mission is responsible for administering Kosovo, promised to investigate (pdf) the incident. Yet have they? And what are the results of the investigation?
I have scoured both the commercial media as well as the United Nations' websites and have found nothing. Zip. Zero.
Not mentioned in any of the United Nations' reports is that all three Americans were Dyncorp employees. Williams had only been in Kosovo two weeks after spending twenty years working as a "corrections officer" in New York. Bigley was from the southern Illinois/western Kentucky region and had also worked as a prison guard. Both Bigley and Williams were killed on the first day of their training in Kosovo.
Gary Weston was from Vienna, Illinois and had worked in the same prison as Bigley. But what exactly happened that day?
From a cache from a Serbian media outlet:
Authorities are investigating whether a Jordanian U.N. policeman who killed three U.S. corrections officers in a gunbattle at a Kosovo prison had links to the Palestinian militant group Hamas, a senior NATO official said.
As investigators tried to pin down Sgt. Maj. Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim Ali's motive, a clearer picture of the April 17 attack emerged this week. Witnesses, U.N. officials, medical personnel and NATO officers, in interviews with the Associated Press, described a scene in which the officers were trapped between a locked gate and Ali's assault rifle.
Eleven officers were wounded before the officers shot and killed Ali, a Palestinian from Jordan. No one is certain what prompted him to open fire, but a survivor said Ali was smiling during his shooting spree, a U.N. source familiar with the investigation said.
A senior NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that besides the investigation into any links with Hamas, authorities were examining a trip Ali took to Saudi Arabia only a month before he joined the mission in March to see if it might be connected to the attack.
Jordan's government said Ali, 30, was a distinguished member of his homeland's special police unit and had been decorated for helping to ward off an attack on the Israeli Embassy in the Jordanian capital, Amman. The United Nations has refused to discuss details of the investigation.
Much is at stake for the U.N. in the outcome of the investigation because the police mission in Kosovo, and others like it, rely on throwing together officers from member countries regardless of political philosophy.
Like Ali, the corrections officers were new to Kosovo. They arrived just 10 days before the attack and were part of an effort to bring professional corrections expertise into the prisons. Since the U.N. took control of the province in 1999, the prison has been supervised by police with little specialized training.
The attack began at the end of the officers' first day at work. Sharing small talk, the officers piled into two vans and a sports utility vehicle and drove to the gate. That is when Ali opened fire.
Bullets pierced the vehicles. Kim Bigley, a prison warden, died in the driver's seat. Gary Weston pushed another guard out of the line of fire, saving her life. Seconds later, gunshots shattered Weston's skull.
The other officers pulled their pistols and sprang for cover. An Austrian officer in one of the outlying buildings, Andreas Pumpa, heard the shooting and ran toward it, only to run into Ali, who sprayed his legs with gunfire.
The officers exchanged fire with their attacker, who was armed with an M-16 automatic rifle. Blocked by the gate, and with buildings on either side, the officers were trapped.
"There was nothing to do but stand and fight," a U.N. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "And they stood and fought."
Ali mowed down a line of officers scrambling toward a wall. One of those wounded may be paralyzed.
When he had shot all those he could see, Ali paced around the vans, searching for more victims.
Inside the prison, people were confused. Several officers raced to the exit, but rounds began to pound into the door. With the only way out blocked, they hit the floor.
Three hundred yards away, in what the officers later called the killing zone, the U.S. citizens realized no help was on the way.
Finally, they got a break: Ali's weapon jammed. As he scrambled to clear it, the corrections officers counterattacked, managing to get into the guard shack where Ali's four subordinates cowered.
They seized the Jordanians' weapons and attacked Ali with equal firepower: His body took 16 rounds.
The officers were detained. Authorities suspect Ali's subordinates may have played a role because more than 400 rounds were fired. The investigation is examining whether they fed him ammunition - so he could keep shooting.
The woman whose live Weston saved that day was Michelle Lindo by the way.
So Ali may or may not be connected to Hamas yet at the same time he's cited as protecting the Israeli Embassy from attack. What gives?
Not to mention that since it was their first day on the job, there is no way that Ali could have had a long standing grudge with any of them. So why did he allegedly fire 600 rounds at an entire group of people, killing three?
And why would Ali, who was also new to the unit, have any reason to hate the other members of the United Nations peacekeeping force? Clearly if Ali signed up to be a UN peacekeeper he would've known beforehand that Americans and other westerners would be working with him. So why did Ali open fire?
The AFP at the time reported that the entire thing had been about Iraq:
As best one can piece together the facts from local and international news sources, the women were leaving a prison where they had been undergoing police training along with U.N. colleagues--in a group of 21 Americans, 2 Turks, and an Austrian--when they came under fire from Jordanian U.N. police on duty at the prison gate. Fire was returned, and Sergeant Major Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim Ali--who had been the first to fire, according to the Associated Press--was killed. Four more Jordanian U.N. policemen have been arrested, and their immunity in the province has been lifted. In addition to the dead, four Americans were wounded in what is described as a 10-minute "shootout" or "gun battle."
An unnamed American police officer told Agence France-Presse that the Middle Easterners had shouted at the Americans that the United States had invaded Iraq and every other country. The same account claimed the Americans shouted back, and the Jordanians started shooting. Reuters, citing "police sources at the scene," also reported that the fight was about Iraq. Both Reuters and AP quoted American police officers as describing a deliberate attack on Americans.
Mustafa Ibrahim Ali, father of the dead man, was quoted as saying his son "was not living on Mars, and he was affected by what is happening in the Palestinian territories and Iraq."
According to the Weekly Standard, Ali was "smiling" as he shot at the non-Jordanian peacekeepers and only quit firing when he gun jammed. The Americans then "stormed" the area where Ali was and fired the 16 bullets at Ali, killing him.
But was the shooting over Iraq or not? Was it over some snide comment that someone made? Hard to say as this report says that the Iraq war was not the motive for the shootout.
Will we ever know what happened? Will the UN ever conclude their investigation? And why has it taken this long, since the shootout happened 9 months ago? I have written to the UNMIK officer in charge of Mitrovica about this and if I get a response I will be sure to post it.
In the meantime I wanted to make sure that Weston, Williams and Bigley were not forgotten. It seems so many times that the mainstream media has complete amnesia, especially when it comes to Americans who have made tremendous sacrifices, people like Keith Matthew Maupin.
This is cross-posted from my blog, where you are humbly invited to visit
Pax