Staff Sergeant Gibbs has been found guilty of murdering unarmed Afghan civilians in 2010. The five-member jury panel for the US court martial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Seattle, Washington, made the verdict, which carries a life sentence, after a week of testimony. He will have a chance of parole in eight years.

He had been accused of leading a group which called itself the "Kill Team" and admitted to participating in only one of the three murders, which out of self-defense while deployed in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar. Three other soldiers from the group had previously pleaded guilty.

A case of 'betrayal'

Gibbs also admitted to taking pictures of the corpses and cutting off fingers and other parts of the bodies as keepsakes. "In my mind, it was like keeping the antlers off a deer you'd shoot...You have to come to terms with the things you're doing," he said.

The prosecutor Major Robert Stelle dismissed Gibbs' claims in his closing remarks that he had been involved in a genuine battle.

"This is a case about betrayal, the ultimate betrayal. He (Gibbs) betrayed his folk, he betrayed his unit, and with the flag of his nation emblazoned across his chest, thousands of miles from home, he betrayed his nation," said Stelle, calling Gibbs' stories "fundamentally implausible."

Embarrassment for the US

Staff Sergeant Gibbs' case caused a lot of embarrassment to the United States and its military. It was one of the most notorious cases that the US Army had to deal with after the Abu Ghraib prison abuse in Iraq in 2004.

Author: AFP, dpa, Reuters / ss
Editor: Sarah Berning