“The truth came out and the whole world saw. The American pilot should be judged by international justice and we want compensation because the act left orphans,” said Safa Chmagh, whose brother Saeed Chmagh, a Reuters driver, died. “He (the pilot) killed unarmed innocent people, among them a photographer whose camera was very visible. On top of that when they evacuated the wounded they opened fire again,” said Safa, whose brother was 44 when killed. Nameer Nooraddin Hussein, a 22-year-old photographer with Reuters, was also shot to death.

Graphic footage of the attack, which killed several other people on the ground and wounded two children, was published on the Internet by Wikileaks, a website that publishes information obtained from whistleblowers.

The video included audio conversations between Apache helicopter pilots and controllers where the US military identified the men in a Baghdad street in broad daylight as armed insurgents and asked for permission to open fire. The footage showed the Reuters men and other Iraqis gunned down in the Ameen district of Baghdad in a hail of cannon fire from an Apache helicopter gunner.

Saeed Chmagh’s grieving son Salwan, 20, was deeply disturbed by the footage which was aired on Arab television channels and seen by more than four million people on the Internet.

“I want the American pilot who killed my father to be judged,” he exclaimed, while close to tears in the Chmagh family’s Baghdad home.

“They were not members of a militia. Everybody saw from the pictures that they were journalists,” he said.