HELSINKI, Jan. 10 (Xinhua) -- The Helsinki District Court sentenced on Thursday a former soldier of the Iraqi army in prison for war crimes, local media reported.
According to the court, the 41-year-old Iraqi man treated the bodies of dead people in an inhuman and degrading way and offended their honor in Iraq in the spring of 2015, when he participated in battles against the militant group ISIS.
The man was accused of posting two horrible videos on Facebook. In the first video, the man cut the head of a dead ISIS fighter, and in the second video, he posed in front of burning corpses.
In the judgment, the court stated that the man's decapitation of a dead fighter, taking videos and photos and distributing them on the social media, are generally a violation of human dignity.
The court, therefore, sentenced him to one and a half years of conditional imprisonment.
The defendant admitted in the court that he cut off the head of a dead fighter and hung the head in his hand, but denied being involved in burning bodies and uploading or allowing others to upload the footage to Facebook.
He also told court the cruelty of ISIS and the injustice he experienced. ISIS had kidnapped his four loved ones, according to the man.
However, the court did not accept the man's reasoning and considered that he had committed war crimes, saying that the cruelty of ISIS' actions against the local population is not a justification for accepting inhuman and degrading treatment.
