Their story is deeply disturbing.

Two American soldiers say they saw two comrades from another US unit kill a boy on a bicycle in cold blood.

The US convoy had encountered and killed six enemy soldiers on the edge of the Iraqi city of Karbala.

The boy, aged 12 to 15, was riding his bike about 15 to 20 metres away.

He was unarmed and posed no threat but the two soldiers shot him anyway.

“Wrong place, wrong time,” said one of the soldiers who shot him.

The two witnesses told all this to a military chaplain, Glenn Palmer.

Palmer recounted the story to me one day on the gruelling journey through the desert from Kuwait to Baghdad.

It was 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, and I was a reporter embedded with a US Army tank battalion.

‘Why am I doing this?’

I’ve never quite been able to let go of the story of the boy on the bike.

It set me on an international quest that has lasted 16 years, to find out if a war crime was committed that day.

I have sat opposite a soldier accused by his comrades of murder. I have asked people to revisit deeply painful memories. I have tried to find the answer to a grieving mother’s question: “Why did they kill my son?”

None of it has been easy.

I’ve had to ask difficult questions of myself too.

Why am I doing this? Is one small incident in a big war worth it? Is it even possible to reach back through the confusion of war and the fading of memories to find an answer?

And do I have the right — or the stomach — to publicly judge soldiers under great pressure in wartime?

David versus Goliath

I didn’t witness the shooting myself.

But the chaplain told me my colleague, photographer Piotr Andrews, pictured below, had taken a photo of the aftermath.

Andrews had arrived on the scene soon after the shooting on April 5.

He told me years later he felt the picture summed up the war: David versus Goliath.

The photo shows the body of the bicyclist face down in sandy dirt. His bike lies next to him, its back wheel crumpled.

At the top of the photo is the barrel of a US tank, with the words “Absolut Krieg” (“Absolute war” in rough German) stencilled in black.

The Army launched an investigation into the shooting and I wrote a short news story about that. The story was sent out on the Reuters news wires, together with Andrews’ picture.

I checked in every so often with the US military to ask about the outcome of the investigation.

Finally, in July 2004, a spokesman told me in an email that “there was insufficient evidence to determine that a crime occurred”.

He added: “A victim has never been identified.”

That sounded strange but there didn’t seem much I could do about it.

At that time, I was based in Senegal, covering West Africa.

And the boy on the bike was just one of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq by then.

I put the story to the back of my mind and got on with life and the day job.

Digging deeper

But the story of the boy on the bike gnawed away at me over the years. In 2010, I resolved to dig deeper.

I asked the US military for documents on the case, using the Freedom of Information Act.

But the military told me it had nothing that matched my request. My investigation looked to be over almost as soon as it had begun.

I contacted Andrews, the photographer, to ask if Army investigators had ever got in touch with him. He told me he’d never heard from the Army.

Then he told me something I could hardly believe — just a few months earlier, a law professor in the US had contacted him about the case.

The professor, Mehmet Konar-Steenberg, teaches at a law school in St Paul, Minnesota.

He and a friend had been so troubled by seeing Andrews’ photo online back in 2003 that they decided to look into the case.

“Maybe it’s because at that point I have a son who’s three years old and, you know, is just getting his first bicycle with training wheels,” Professor Konar-Steenberg told me when I visited him at his college.

“But something about that photograph grabbed me.”

Professor Konar-Steenberg and his friend, Jason Sack, wrote to US officials asking for details of the investigation.

Eventually, they got a letter from a US Army colonel.

It said the bicyclist had not been a boy but “a military-aged man in his early 20s” and the evidence indicated he was either “acting as an enemy combatant at the time he was killed” or at least acting in a way that meant he could reasonably be seen as one.

It said witnesses had “no doubt” he was part of a group of men ahead of him who were carrying weapons on a cart pulled by a tractor.

That account didn’t match what the witnesses had told the US Army chaplain back in 2003.

Professor Konar-Steenberg let things be for a while. Like me, though, he couldn’t quite let go.

In 2009, he asked the military for documents related to the case.

And this time, he got lucky.

The Army provided a copy of the investigation file — a thick pile of witness statements and assessments by US military lawyers.

The file revealed the colonel’s letter was not a fair summary of the witness statements.

For one thing, there was no consensus about the age of the bicyclist.

One soldier put him between 10 and 15 years old, another said he wasn’t older than 12, a third called him a “young boy”.

Others had him in his mid-teens, late teens or early 20s. One soldier even suggested he was about 30.

Soldiers also gave different accounts of how far away he had been from the group with the weapons.

Six soldiers stated he had not posed a threat. Only two said definitively he had — the two who fired at him.

‘I witnessed somebody get murdered’

To have any chance of finding out what really happened, I would have to speak to people directly involved.

In December 2012, I drove with a colleague to a small town in rural Michigan to visit Bob Grover, one of the soldiers who had talked to the chaplain about the shooting.

He had left the military and was going back to college the following month, having been laid off from his last job.

Mr Grover sported a goatee and wore a large quilted grey-and-black checked shirt over a dark T-shirt.

His partner took their children out of the house so we could talk undisturbed.

As we sat at a table in his home, Mr Grover closed his eyes and cast his mind back to that day on the edge of Karbala. He almost seemed to be in a trance.

“A young guy on a bike coming down the road, looked up at me, smiled. I waved,” Mr Grover recalled.

“As he gets closer … pow-pow, pow-pow! Somebody shot … somebody shot him, and he fell face first, didn’t move, not even an inch.”

Mr Grover was in no doubt about what he had seen.

“I witnessed somebody get murdered,” he told me.

“The guy didn’t have a gun, he was riding a bike. And that didn’t sit right with me. And I didn’t let it go, I couldn’t.”

I read Mr Grover part of the Army letter, which said the bicyclist was acting in a way that meant he could be seen as an enemy combatant.

“I think that’s an out-and-out lie. It’s ridiculous,” he said.

Mr Grover said he still thought about the shooting several times a week.

“I have problems letting things go,” he said. “I try not to think about it as much but it just runs through my head.”

I felt I also had to try to speak to the soldiers who had fired the shots.

But I didn’t relish confronting them. I found myself wondering: Who am I to dredge up this thing, years later? And for what purpose?

I’m still not sure I can answer that. One thought that kept me going was that there was a family in Iraq that deserved answers.

I thought it was very unlikely either soldier would agree to speak to me. But one of them did.

In May 2013, I left my home in London and travelled to Tennessee to meet William, one of the soldiers who had shot the bicyclist.

William was still in the Army at that time.

We met in my hotel room, along with a local journalist who had approached William on my behalf.

He wore a slightly tattered blue Chicago Cubs baseball cap, a shiny blue baseball shirt with a large red Cubs logo, blue jeans and black Adidas sneakers. His right forearm bore a tattoo of his daughter’s name. His left arm had a long scar, which he told me came from Iraq.

I should maybe have felt angry or at least fired up as I sat opposite him. But I felt nervous — and grateful, that he had agreed to talk to me. In his position, I’m not sure I’d have done the same.

William recalled the day of the shooting, how he’d felt tired but just wanting to keep going. He saw the cart with the trailer go by his truck and then heard a barrage of fire.

Listen to the feature

Earshot follows Andrew Gray on his mission to find out the identity of the boy on the bike.

“I just oriented my weapon in that direction, looked and just started firing,” he said.

“You know, by that time, if we’re taking fire, you’ve got to return fire, to gain that fire superiority.

“I wanted to come home alive, that’s just the way it is, you know, and make sure my soldiers come back alive too.”

He said he hadn’t aimed specifically at the bicyclist, whom he described as a man, not a boy.

He said the bicyclist had fit the description of paramilitary fighters who wore civilian clothes but military boots.

“I did not aim at him to shoot at him. Was he in the direction of fire? Was he in that path? Yeah,” he said.

“You can’t second-guess yourself. You can’t do it, you don’t have time. ‘Well maybe should I or shouldn’t I?’ You don’t have that luxury. Especially at that time, during the actual war.

“You have to make a decision. If it’s the right decision, OK, if it’s the wrong decision, OK.”

I asked him if he was comfortable with the decision he had made that day.

“It doesn’t bother me,” he said.

Am I sorry that it happened? Yeah, I am. I mean, if I had to do it again, I’d do it again.

The boy on the bike

Even as I’d tracked down soldiers, analysed witness statements and sought to reconstruct the shooting, I had also been trying to answer the one question no-one seemed to have even tried to address: who was “the boy on the bike”?

Thanks to the investigation file, I was able to work out the rough location of the incident.

I hired an Iraqi journalist, Ali Al Mshakheel, to go there and see if anyone knew who the bicyclist was.

He took Andrews’ photo with him.

At first, Al Mshakheel drew a blank. People remembered the incident with the group on the tractor and cart. A local man told Al Mshakheel the group had looted a nearby military training centre and that’s why they’d been carrying weapons. No-one knew who the cyclist was.

But a few days later, Al Mshakheel got a call from a man who said he was a brother of the cyclist.

He went back to the Karbala area to visit the family, who live in a poor neighbourhood outside the city.

Finally, the boy on the bike had a name — Firas Khadhem.

He was the fifth of seven children. When Al Mshakheel visited, his photograph hung in the hallway.

To earn a living, Firas repaired bicycles, grew crops with his family and worked in a brick factory in the summer.

But Firas wasn’t a boy. The soldiers who fired at him had been right about that. He was 23 years old when he died.

His mother, Lilwah, told Al Mshakheel she had woken Firas on April 5, 2003 and asked him to get vegetables from a local market.

He set off on his bike around 9:00am.

The family later heard gunshots but that was normal during the war.

Then a neighbour told Sabah, his brother, that Firas had been shot.

Sabah ran to the scene of the shooting but couldn’t get to his brother’s body until US soldiers left, about 15 minutes later.

“I thought he was still alive because there wasn’t much blood but he was getting bluer and bluer with time,” Sabah told Al Mshakheel.

“I carried the body of my brother to our house where everybody was weeping and crying.”

During his visit, Al Mshakheel asked to see the clothes Firas had been wearing when he died, to be sure we had found the right family.

Sure enough, the clothes matched those in Andrews’ picture — bright blue trousers and a dark blue shirt with patterned pale blue stripes.

Another of Firas’s brothers, Jabbar, showed Al Mshakheel the bullet holes in the shirt.

While Jabbar was showing the clothes, his mother entered the room and began to weep.

“I know my son. He could never harm them or even throw a stone at them,” Lilwah said of the Americans.

“He was afraid of them even before we saw them. How could he harm them? Why did they kill my son?”

Even 16 years on, I can’t answer that question.

There are no definitive answers to the questions that would determine whether Firas could have been seen as a legitimate target, like how close he was to the group with the weapons, or even whether he was wearing military-style boots. His family says he was wearing sandals.

In the investigation file, two soldiers said ammunition was found on the bike after the shooting. One said it was in an ammunition crate. Firas’s bike had a wooden box on the back. Could that have been an ammunition crate? Could Firas have gone to the military training centre and taken some ammunition?

It’s impossible to say.

His family says Firas already had the box. And only two of 23 soldiers mentioned the ammunition in their statements.

In a sense, it doesn’t matter.

Neither of the soldiers who shot Firas mentioned ammunition on the bike, or cited the possibility of something concealed in the box as a reason to fire at him.

Over the years, people have asked me whether this is even a story worth telling.

After all, this is just one of countless civilian deaths in Iraq since the war began 16 years ago this month.

But just because we can’t tell all of those stories doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell the ones that come to us. This was the one that came to me.

When I first heard about the shooting 16 years ago, one thing above all motivated me.

It was that thought of a family somewhere in Iraq that knew their son had been killed by American soldiers but didn’t know why.

Even by publishing a short news story about the investigation back then, I wanted them to know that others within this foreign force — at least a few soldiers and a reporter — were trying to make sure justice was done.

Perhaps I wanted them to know that we weren’t as bad as we seemed. I wanted them to know that we cared.

It may be very little comfort but I hope they know that now.

Credits

Reporter: Andrew Gray

Additional reporting : Hussein Al Jubori

Editor: Monique Ross

Digital production: Farz Edraki

Photography: Piotr Andrews (Reuters) and Ali Al Mshakheel

Additional photographs: Getty: Joe Raedle, Wathiq Khuzaie, Scott Nelson, Joe Sohm, Visions of America, Jasmin Merdan, Chris Hondros, Justin Sullivan

Topics: journalism, community-and-society, family-and-children, children, unrest-conflict-and-war, history, united-states, iraq