A criminal investigation into the death of Army Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar, who was killed last June while deployed in Bamako, Mali, has prompted a broad internal military audit and investigation into SEAL Team 6, according to a military official and two others briefed on the case.

Photo: U.S. Army

Investigators suspect the two SEALs being investigated in the Melgar case were stealing cash from operational funds used for informants and other contingencies while deployed. The new investigation aims to determine whether such thefts are a routine practice among the members of the elite counterterrorism unit, according to the military official and two other people familiar with the financial investigation. All three sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation. The SEALs have denied stealing the cash. The additional investigation sheds new light on the homicide case, which gained national attention last fall, and threatens to further tarnish the reputation of SEAL Team 6, the U.S. military’s most storied and mythologized command. Melgar, staff sergeant of the 3rd Special Forces Group, died last June after being allegedly “choked out” by SEAL Team 6 operator Anthony DeDolph as fellow SEAL Adam Matthews watched. Investigators from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service have finished interviewing witnesses, and one of the military officials said the case was expected to be handed over to the Navy for a decision of whether to prosecute DeDolph and Matthews. NCIS had no comment, citing an ongoing investigation. The Navy declined to make DeDolph and Matthews available for comment. The two SEALs were assigned to SEAL Team 6’s Silver Squadron and deployed to Mali as part of a counterterrorism task force for the Joint Special Operations Command. The SEALs conducted intelligence-gathering and training missions inside Mali and were based at the U.S. Embassy in Bamako. DeDolph and Matthews brought Melgar, with whom they had shared embassy housing, to a medical clinic in the early-morning hours of June 4 last year. Melgar was unconscious and not breathing. The two SEALs claimed they had found Melgar in that condition and tried to resuscitate him with an emergency tracheotomy. Melgar was pronounced dead at the clinic. Much of the early stage of the investigation was spent unwinding the two SEALs’s conflicting statements about how Melgar died. Initially, DeDolph and Matthews told investigators that Melgar had been intoxicated earlier in the evening. Later, a medical examiner determined that Melgar had no alcohol or drugs in his system at the time of his death. The medical examiner concluded that he had died as a result of “homicide by asphyxiation” — strangulation. According to two people who have reviewed the medical examiner’s report, Melgar’s throat and upper torso appeared to have been mutilated, an apparent result of a poorly executed tracheotomy by DeDolph, a SEAL medic. After the medical examiner concluded that Melgar had been strangled to death and had not been intoxicated at the time of his death, the SEALs told military officials that DeDolph, a former professional mixed martial arts fighter, had accidentally choked Melgar during a late-night sparring match in their shared apartment. Melgar’s wife told investigators that her husband did not practice mixed martial arts or otherwise participate in recreational sparring. Eventually, the SEALs changed their story again, according to two individuals briefed on the investigation.