Why don't they go after Krekar????

Mullah Krekar should be extradited and tried...

IT is almost seven years since Australian cameraman Paul Moran was killed by a suicide bomber in northern Iraq while covering the first days of the 2003 Iraq war. He left behind a grieving widow and a baby daughter, born only seven weeks before his death.

In those seven years there has been no investigation into Moran's death.

The founder and trainer of the terrorist group responsible for his murder has been living freely in Norway as a political refugee while continuing to advocate the killing of Western infidels, including Australians. He has not been investigated by Australian authorities nor any attempt made to interview him.

Now, prompted by the Australian Federal Police decision to launch a war-crimes investigation into the 1975 murder of five Australian journalists in East Timor, Moran's ABC colleagues are pushing to have his killers brought to justice.

"`Why has there been no investigation into the murder?" asks Mark Corcoran, presenter and veteran reporter with ABC TV's Foreign Correspondent program. "As of December 2009, I have still not seen any evidence of an investigation, either formally or informally, by any Australian official."

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It was Corcoran who took the dreaded midnight phone call from an anguished colleague in March 2003 with the news of Moran's death. He could hear screaming and wailing sirens over the phone line. ABC reporter Eric Campbell was wandering, dazed and bloodied by shrapnel, in the wreckage of a roadblock where the team had been filming when it was blown up.

Corcoran had never met Moran, a 39-year-old freelancer from Adelaide who got his first TV break as a camera operator on Here's Humphrey, but clearly feels a personal responsibility to ensure he is not forgotten.

"Moran was murdered in 2003. Mullah Krekar, the terrorist leader who created the suicide bomber unit that killed Moran, is alive and well. He is living in Norway and taunting the Australian government to come and get him. Yet Canberra does nothing," Corcoran says.

His frustration is echoed by Campbell, who suffered shrapnel injuries, permanent hearing loss and post-traumatic stress disorder after the bombing.

"If there's a chance this guy can be prosecuted for the murder of an Australian abroad, he should be prosecuted. There's a far more pressing need for this than for the Balibo five, which happened 34 years ago," Campbell says. "This was six years ago, in a war that's still going on. And it involves the international jihadist movement which is targeting Australians right now."

The bombing that killed Moran was carried out by Ansar al-Islam, a militant group fighting for an Islamic state in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq. Its responsibility for the killing was later confirmed by the group's founder and former leader, an Iraqi national, Najmuddin Faraj Ahmad, widely known as Mullah Krekar. In 2007, Corcoran tracked Krekar down in Oslo, where he boasted about the suicide squad he established which killed Moran.

"There's no difference between suicide bombs and using Kalashnikov," Krekar said. "What's the difference, when you send the fighters to death, what's the difference between someone who uses only on-off [switch] or someone who use his finger -- what's the difference? It's the same."

When Corcoran asked him what he would say to Moran's widow and daughter, he replied: "`I say to all the Western women, don't send your sons to kill us."

To Krekar, the fact that Moran was a cameraman, not a soldier, made no difference. "He was also with our enemy . . . In this area it is allowed for me in Islam to kill [a soldier], to kill his translator, to kill the people which give him food, give him water, give him medicine -- all of them is in the line of war."