The spokesman for the Prison Service said in a statement briefed by " Shafaq News " , that “ Steven Dale Green , 28 years old died last Saturday in Arizona ( south-west ) as the prisons’ guards found him unconscious in his cell last Tuesday”.

"The FBI has been informed and the investigation on the incident was considered as a suicide ."

It was one of the most disturbing war crimes to emerge from the brutal conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan: U.S. Army Pfc. Steven Dale Green raped and killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl in 2006 after shooting and killing her parents and younger sister. Then he and his combat buddies from a nearby U.S. Army checkpoint set the girl’s corpse on fire.

Green, 28, serving five life sentences, apparently has committed suicide eight years after the crimes. He was found hanging in his cell at the federal maximum security prison in Tucson last week and died Saturday, prison officials announced Tuesday, the Los Angeles Newspaper said .

Green was a 19-year-old college dropout when he joined the Army and deployed to Iraq. At the traffic checkpoint, near the Iraqi town of Mahmoudiya, he and fellow soldiers abused alcohol and drugs and came up with a plan to have sex with the Iraqi girl, Abeer Kassem Hamza Janabi, according to court testimony. They had watched her from the checkpoint as she performed household chores.

In a December 2010 interview from prison with the Associated Press, Green blamed his behavior, in part, on the deaths of two fellow soldiers killed by insurgents near the checkpoint. Those deaths "messed me up real bad," he said.

He also blamed the Army, which he said had abandoned him and the rest of his unit at the checkpoint.

"There’s not a word that would describe how much I hated these people," Green said of Iraqis. "I wasn’t thinking these people were humans."

The day of the rapes and killings, Green said, he was in an "altered state of mind."

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