GI Gets Life in Prison for Killing Kosovo Girl

Taking less than an hour to deliberate, a military court here sentenced a U.S. soldier Tuesday to life in prison without parole for killing an 11-year-old ethnic Albanian girl while on peacekeeping duty in Kosovo.

“I don’t know what went wrong that day,” Army Staff Sgt. Frank J. Ronghi, 36, of Niles, Ohio, said in an apology to the family of Merita Shabiu.

But Merita’s mother, Remzije, said the killing was all the more painful because it was at the hands of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization soldier sent to protect ethnic Albanians. “Not only Merita died. We all died,” she said.

Ronghi, who sat impassively as the verdict was read, pleaded guilty Friday to charges of murder, forcible sodomy and indecent acts in the Jan. 13 death of Merita.

“I know what I did was very wrong,” he told the court Tuesday. “That’s why I pleaded guilty.”

“I apologize from the bottom of my heart to the family. I ask them for forgiveness,” Ronghi said, reading from a piece of paper and showing no emotion.

But the girl’s father, Hamdi, said through a translator that although family members were satisfied with the verdict and the Army’s handling of the case, they would never be able to forgive Ronghi.

“If he had accidentally killed her, we would forgive him on the spot,” he said, his distraught wife at his side. “But not only did he do what he did to her, he wanted to hide her body, so that we would not even have a grave for her.”

Ronghi was led out of the courtroom to be returned to the U.S. military stockade in Mannheim, south of Frankfurt. An Army spokesman, Maj. Eric Gunhus, said it would probably take a week to 10 days before Ronghi is flown from Germany to Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., to begin serving his sentence.

In an emotional day of testimony, prosecutors described in painstaking detail how Ronghi lured the girl into a basement where he assaulted her, then killed her to stop her cries.

He returned later for the body and buried it beneath the snow on a hilltop. A private who accompanied him reported the incident to superiors.

Merita’s parents and two siblings, who traveled from Kosovo, Yugoslavia, for Ronghi’s sentencing, had left the courtroom by the time Ronghi apologized.

Ronghi, a weapons squad leader assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment at Ft. Bragg, N.C., also apologized to the Army, his unit and his family.

The defense said Ronghi was “an ordinary person who did ordinary things,” until he encountered a culture of excessive violence and abuse of power during duty in Kosovo.