Australia/Norway: Calls to prosecute Krekar for journalist murder

Australia/Norway: Calls to prosecute Krekar for journalist murder


From The Australian:


"If there's a chance this guy can be prosecuted for the murder of an Australian abroad, he should be prosecuted. There's a far more pressing need for this than for the Balibo five, which happened 34 years ago," Campbell says. "This was six years ago, in a war that's still going on. And it involves the international jihadist movement which is targeting Australians right now."


The bombing that killed Moran was carried out by Ansar al-Islam, a militant group fighting for an Islamic state in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq. Its responsibility for the killing was later confirmed by the group's founder and former leader, an Iraqi national, Najmuddin Faraj Ahmad, widely known as Mullah Krekar. In 2007, Corcoran tracked Krekar down in Oslo, where he boasted about the suicide squad he established which killed Moran.


"There's no difference between suicide bombs and using Kalashnikov," Krekar said. "What's the difference, when you send the fighters to death, what's the difference between someone who uses only on-off [switch] or someone who use his finger -- what's the difference? It's the same."


When Corcoran asked him what he would say to Moran's widow and daughter, he replied: "`I say to all the Western women, don't send your sons to kill us."


To Krekar, the fact that Moran was a cameraman, not a soldier, made no difference. "He was also with our enemy . . . In this area it is allowed for me in Islam to kill [a soldier], to kill his translator, to kill the people which give him food, give him water, give him medicine -- all of them is in the line of war."


Campbell says: "It's very galling when you have this guy openly gloating about Ansar al-Islam and savouring the details of Paul Moran's murder, and nothing happens."