That is incorrect according to testimony from the American soldiers who were there.
“I just remember being dumbstruck that there was someone being alive in there,” a Delta Force soldier told the Star during an interview for the
. “After all that bombing, after all the ordinance we dropped in there, somebody was still alive.”Guantanamo’s Child. “After all that bombing, after all the ordinance we dropped in there, somebody was still alive.”
As the soldiers cleared the compound, their weapons were drawn. They did not expect any survivors.
A Pentagon report written after the firefight interviewing the soldier who shot Khadr, identified only as OC-1, raises the possibility that someone else was alive in the compound when the grenade that ultimately killed Speer was thrown. “He heard moaning coming from the back of the compound. The dust rose up from the ground and began to clear. He then saw a man facing him lying on his right side,” the report states.
“
The man had an AK-47 on the ground beside him and the man was moving. OC-1 fired one round striking the man in the head and the movement ceased. Dust was again stirred by this rifle shot. When the dust rose,
he saw a second man sitting up facing away from him leaning against the brush. This man, later identified as Khadr, was moving . . . . OC-1 fired two rounds both of which struck Khadr in the back.”
Randy Watt, the commander who wrote that report after the action,
later revised it to state that only one person was alive when the grenade was thrown. In an interview, he attributed the confusion to the “fog of battle.” He changed the report, he said, because he thought Khadr had been killed due to the severity of his injuries.
The report, and testimony from Watt and OC-1, would have been key evidence at Khadr’s Guantanamo trial, which was halted when the Pentagon offered him a plea deal.
A condition of the deal was that Khadr confess to killing Speer, which he did during an emotional 2010 hearing at Guantanamo where Speer’s widow Tabitha was present. Once released, Khadr did not deny throwing the grenade as his lawyers have insisted.
