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- The deaths of Phillip Esposito and Louis Allen occurred on June 7, 2005, at Forward Operating Base Danger in Tikrit, Iraq. Captain Phillip Esposito and First Lieutenant Louis Allen, from a New York Army National Guard unit of the United States 42nd Infantry Division, were mortally wounded in Esposito's office by a Claymore mine and died. Military investigators determined that the mine was deliberately placed in the window and detonated to kill Esposito and Allen. Staff Sergeant Alberto B. Martinez, who was in the officers' unit, was charged with two counts of premeditated murder. In 2006, two years before the trial, Martinez volunteered in a plea bargain to plead guilty to murder in exchange for a life sentence with parole; Lt. Gen. John Vines, commander of the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps and the convening authority, rejected the deal. In the court martial, Martinez was acquitted on December 4, 2008, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The case was one of only two publicly known alleged fragging incidents among American forces during the Iraq War and the only one to take place in Iraq, in contrast to numerous incidents among United States forces during the Vietnam War of the 1960s and early 1970s. In April 2005, Sergeant Hasan Karim Akbar had been convicted on charges of premeditated murder and sentenced to death for the first incident, which took place in March 2003 in Kuwait. (en)
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