2 Navy SEALs Under Suspicion in Strangling of Green Beret in Mali
Sergeant 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. No one has been charged in Sergeant 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
Neither the Army nor the military’s Africa Command issued a statement about Sergeant Melgar’s death, not even after investigators changed their description of the two SEALs from “witnesses” to “persons of interest,” meaning the 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 Sergeant 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.
Those who knew Sergeant 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 who texted and talked via Skype multiple times a day with his wife while serving overseas.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/us/politics/navy-seals-team-6-strangle-green-beret-mali.html
A version of this article appears in print on October 30, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 2 Navy SEALs Are Under Suspicion in Green Beret’s Death in Mali.
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