LAS ROZAS, Spain — In her tidy living room, Maria Isabel Permuy keeps lighted candles next to photos of her dead son, Jose Couso. Consumed by grief, she believes American soldiers murdered him as he filmed the battle for Baghdad from the Palestine Hotel three years ago this month.
Half a world away, in Kentucky, the commander of the Army tank that fired the fatal round still carries the burden of what happened as he fought to hold the Jumhuriya Bridge over the Tigris River. Sgt. 1st Class Shawn Gibson, a devout Christian, prays for Couso's family, and for understanding and forgiveness.
On the morning of April 8, 2003, nearly 100 reporters and cameramen were in their second day of covering the firefight from balconies at the Palestine, on the east bank of the Tigris. They felt reasonably safe, assuming American soldiers on the west bank knew the hotel was the main base of operations for the foreign news media in Baghdad.
The soldiers, locked in battle and cut off from news reports for the previous three weeks, had never heard of the Palestine Hotel. Under withering fire from Iraqi soldiers and militiamen, they were desperately searching for an enemy "spotter" in a high-rise directing mortar attacks against their Abrams tanks.
When Gibson's tank gunner noticed a man with binoculars on a balcony across the river, he and other soldiers believed they had their spotter. With permission from his superiors, Gibson ordered the gunner to fire.
A single high-explosive round slammed into the side of the hotel on the 14th floor, nearly severing Couso's left leg. Couso, a cameraman for Spain's Telecinco network, and Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian-born Reuters TV cameraman, died of their wounds.
People on both sides of the Tigris that day experienced the same event, yet came away with contradictory conclusions about intent and culpability. Even with the passage of time, all of them -- and their families -- still live with the consequences, and some still feel aggrieved.
For Couso's family, their legal recourse is all but exhausted, but they cling to Couso's memory and the hope they will someday see justice.
Even now, Permuy said, it is difficult to get out of bed every morning and put on her eye makeup. At 62, a mother of five, she must help raise two young grandsons who lost their father.
"My life is destroyed," she said, surrounded by the low flames of the candles. "I will fight for justice for Jose until the day I die.... I want to see those soldiers in the dock."
