Somalia Affair - March 4 Killing

March 4 Killing

On March 4, two unarmed Somalis were shot in the back, one fatally, after Canadian troops laid an ambush to try to catch petty thieves stealing from the military base in Belet Huen. This followed from a decision by Captain Michel Rainville to re-label petty theft by Somalis as "sabotage", a distinction that meant deadly force could be used to defend the base. Rainville relied on the argument that a fuel pump used to service American MedEvac helicopters had been stolen deliberately to hinder the military effort, while critics pointed out that any saboteurs likely would have ignited the thousands of gallons of fuel surrounding it.

After Warrant Officer Marsh discovered the missing fuel pump, he suggested installing a large searchlight atop a tower to deter thieves. He was dismissed by Rainville, who suggested that the idea was not to deter thieves, but to catch them in the act using night vision. Rainville ordered that food and water be placed in a trailer at the south end of the compound, visible to Somalis walking past on the nearby road. Some soldiers alleged this constituted "bait", but Rainville would later defend himself saying it had been to distinguish between thieves and saboteurs to prevent shooting thieves.

Rainville enlisted Cpl. Ben Klick of the PPCLI to lay in a truckbed at night, awaiting potential "saboteurs" with a C3A1 rifle. From his position, he watched two Somalis, Ahmed Arush and Abdi Hunde Bei Sabrie, approach the food and water that the Canadians had laid out as bait. Fifteen minutes after first noticing the pair, the thieves began to run from the base in fear they had been noticed; Rainville yelled at them to "stop", and called to Sgt. Plante, Cpl. King and Cpl. Favasoli to "get them". Plante fired with his shotgun, while King fired with his C7; Plante's shot wounded Sabrie, who fell to the ground, while Arush kept running back towards the roadway. Cpl Leclerc and MCpl Countway both shot at him as he ran, although Cpl. Klick had refrained noting that the man presented no risk to Canadian forces. Arush fell to the ground, hit by one of the two men's shots. He struggled to stand up, but both men fired again, killing him.

It was noted that Sabrie had been carrying a ceremonial dagger in his clothing. When the unit was ordered to bring the dead body of Arush be brought over to the same position as Sabrie, the soldiers radioed back that they couldn't move the body without it falling apart. So the body of Arush was loaded into a body bag and placed inside a Bison personnel carrier. There, medical technician MCpl Petersen re-opened the bag and took Polaroid photographs for an unknown reason, some suggest to document the shooting, others suggest as a "trophy". The photos showed gaping wounds in Arush's neck and the side of his face, with his skull twisted out of shape by the force of the gunblast. His intestines protruded from his stomach, and his right eye is missing.

An Air Force flight surgeon, Major Barry Armstrong, examined the body and judged the death "suspicious", suggesting that Arush had been lying prone on the ground when he was killed. He also noted that the amount of omentum which had passed through the first wounds suggested the 29-year-old Arush had been breathing for at least 2 or 3 minutes before the final gunshots to his head were fired.

After the examination, Arush's body was then used for medical practice for soldiers, demonstrating how to stab a tracheotomy into a wounded man's throat to allow him to breathe, and then used to demonstrate the proper preparation of a body for transportation. The body was then returned to the body bag, and sent into the local hospital, where Dr. Xelen released it to Arush's family the same evening. For the next two weeks, Colonel Allan Wells approached Vice-Admiral Larry Murray asking to send military police to Somalia to investigate the shooting, but was rebuffed. When the Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral John Rogers Anderson, visited the military base on March 8–9, he visited the wounded Somali recovering in the Canadian hospital.

The event would not have been reported, except that Member of Parliament John Brewin read out an anonymous letter he had received from a soldier about witnessing the "execution" of a Somali civilian on March 4.

At the subsequent inquiry, Klick defended Rainville, heavily criticising his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Carol Mathieu, and testified that American Special Forces Chief Warrant Officer Jackson had interrogated the wounded Somali who confessed to being a saboteur; although this contradicted all other evidence, including the statements of the American soldier who never mentioned any interrogation. In 1994, the Ministry of Defence engaged in an undercover attempt to discredit Armstrong's findings, phoning Allan Thompson of the Toronto Star and offering to leak to him the pathology report by James Ferris conducted two months after the killing, which found the decomposing body showed none of the signs Armstrong had suggested. Thompson took his evidence of a preconceived "leak" from the Ministry to the subsequent inquiry, where they added weight to Armstrong's findings. While his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Carol Mathieu described Armstrong as bordering on insanity at the inquiry, the only evidence he produced was that he liked to climb onto the roof of the hospital at night in Somalia and watch the stars.