2 Navy SEALs Under Suspicion in Strangling of Green Beret in Mali

WASHINGTON: Navy criminal authorities are investigating whether two members of the elite SEAL Team 6 strangled an Army Green Beret in June while they were in Mali on a secret assignment, military officials say.

Staff Sgt. Logan J. Melgar, a 34-year-old veteran of two tours in Afghanistan, was found dead on June 4 in the embassy housing he shared in the Malian capital, Bamako, with a few other Special Operations forces assigned to the West African nation to help with training and counterterrorism missions.

His killing is the latest violent death under mysterious circumstances for US troops on little-known missions in that region of Africa. Four US soldiers were killed in an ambush this month in neighbouring Niger while conducting what was initially described as a reconnaissance patrol but was later changed to supporting a much more dangerous counterterrorism mission against Islamic militants in the area.

The Navy SEALs’ potential involvement also raised the prospect of a highly unusual killing of a US soldier by fellow troops, and threatened to stain SEAL Team 6, the famed counterterrorism unit that carried out the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

Melgar’s superiors in Stuttgart, Germany, almost immediately suspected foul play, and dispatched an investigating officer to the scene within 24 hours, military officials said. Agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command arrived soon after and spent months on the case before handing it off last month to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).

No one has been charged in Melgar’s death, which a military medical examiner ruled to be “a homicide by asphyxiation”, or strangulation, said three military officials briefed on the autopsy results. The two Navy SEALs, who have not been identified, were flown out of Mali shortly after the episode and were placed on administrative leave.

The biggest unanswered question is why Melgar was killed. “NCIS does not discuss the details of ongoing investigations,” Ed Buice, the agency’s spokesman, said in an email, confirming that his service had taken over the case on September 25.

Neither the Army nor the military’s Africa Command issued a statement about Melgar’s death, not even after investigators changed their description of the two SEALs from “witnesses” to “persons of interest”, meaning authorities were trying to determine what the commandos knew about the death and if they were involved.

The uncertainty has left soldiers in the tight-knit Green Beret community to speculate wildly about any number of possible motives, from whether it was a personal dispute among housemates gone horribly wrong to whether Melgar had stumbled upon some illicit activity the SEALs were involved in, and they silenced him, according to interviews with troops and their families. Other officials briefed on the inquiry said they had heard no suggestion that the Navy commandos had been doing anything illegal.

When contacted separately by telephone Saturday, Melgar’s widow, Michelle, and his brother, Shawn, declined to comment.

Lawmakers have criticised top officers and Pentagon officials for offering a shifting timeline of the events in the Niger attack, and for failing to respond with timely, accurate information about the US military’s role on the continent at a time when President Donald Trump has loosened restrictions on the armed forces to intensify attacks against Daesh and Al Qaida around the world.

Melgar, a graduate of Texas Tech University who joined the Army in 2012, was assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the same unit whose soldiers were attacked by a much larger and heavily armed group of Daesh fighters near the border between Niger and Mali on October 4.

According to military officials, Melgar was part of a small team in Bamako assigned to help provide intelligence about Islamic militancies in Mali to the US ambassador there, Paul A. Folmsbee, to protect US personnel against attacks. The sergeant also helped assess which Malian army troops might be trained and equipped to build a counterterrorism force.

Melgar, a native of Lubbock, Texas, was about four months into what military officials said was a six-month tour in Mali, and was living with three other US Special Operations troops in a house provided by the US Embassy.

Two of those housemates were members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, which has over the past decade carried out kill-or-capture missions in Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, as well as the one that killed Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.

According to two senior US military officials, the two SEAL commandos were in Mali with the approvalof Folmsbee in a previously undisclosed and unusual clandestine mission to support French and Malian counterterrorism forces battling Al Qaida’s branch in North and West Africa, known as Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, as well as smaller cells aligned with Al Qaida or Daesh. The Americans helped provide intelligence for missions, and had participated in at least two such operations in Mali this year before Melgar’s death.

Those who knew Melgar described him as a soldier’s soldier — he deployed to Afghanistan twice on training missions between July 2014 and February 2016, according to his Army service record — and a devoted father of two sons, 13 and 15, who texted and talked via Skype multiple times a day with his wife while serving overseas.

More than four months later, his death still has many at Fort Bragg and in Lubbock reeling. An online community bulletin board in Lubbock stated: “A Melgar family representative shared that ‘Staff Sgt. Melgar did what most only dream of and excelled at every turn! His life was epic! He is missed dearly every single day.’”

Melgar was also honoured at the high school he attended in Wolfforth, Texas, Frenship High, during the homecoming football game on October 6.

A final tribute awaits Melgar: He is scheduled to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on November 20.