Mohammad Kinani added:
"There was absolutely no shooting or any sign of danger for us or Blackwater. No one was in the slightest danger.
"Suddenly, in the flash of a second, they started shooting in all directions. And it wasn't warning shots. They were shooting as if they were fighting in the field.
"By the time they stopped shooting, the car looked like a sieve. This is the only way to describe it, because it was truly riddled with bullets. They finished with the first car and turned their guns on us. It turned into the apocalypse.
"When one man tried to run, they shot him. He dropped dead on the spot. He was on the ground bleeding, and they were shooting nonstop. They shot like they were trying to kill everyone they could see. He sank into his own blood. And every minute, they would go back and shoot him again, and I could see his body shake with every bullet. He was dead, but his body shook with the bullets. He would shoot at someone else and then go back to shooting at this dead man."
Kinani ordered his passengers to get down for cover, reporting:
"After they had killed everyone in sight, my sister and I kept still. I had her rest her head on my lap, and my body was on top of her. We would sneak to peek from under the dashboard. They continued shooting here and there, killing this and that one. Then it cleared. Nothing was moving on the street. Only the Blackwater men were moving. Then, they drove off."
At first, it appeared as though Kinani and his family members were unscathed.
Until Kinani's nephew delivered the news that Ali, nicknamed "Allawi," was dead.
The Blackwater mercenaries were never supposed to have been there.
One of their team leaders requested permission to exit the protected Green Zone to help recover a US official other nearby contractors were guarding.
His request was denied.
They went anyway.
One of the FBI agents who subsequently investigated the killings, Thomas O'Connor, corroborated Mohammad Kinani's account:
"Two Iraqi traffic officers stopped the traffic going toward the four armored vehicles. One of the first cars in that stopped traffic was a white KIA occupied by a woman and her son. The woman was a local doctor and the son, who was driving the car, was going to medical school to follow in his mother's footsteps.
"A sniper [Nicholas Slatten] on the Raven 23 team placed his rifle out a porthole of the Bearcat armored vehicle and fired at the driver of the white KIA. The man was struck and killed by the bullet.
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