July
29,2000
AP
News
FRANKFURT, Germany -- A U.S. soldier scheduled to stand
trial next week for the killing of an ethnic Albanian girl in Kosovo has pleaded guilty, a military spokeswoman said Saturday.
Staff Sgt. Frank J. Ronghi, 36, entered the plea late Friday at the request of his defense lawyer and will be sentenced Monday, the day his trial was to start, said Hilda Patton, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army's 5th Corps.
He pleaded guilty to charges of murder, forcible sodomy and three counts of indecent acts with a child, she said.
But prosecutors, without explanation, dropped two other charges, one of rape and another of sodomy murder -- a single charge distinct from the murder and forcible sodomy charges -- during the two-hour session led by a U.S. Army judge, Col. Kenneth
Clavenger.
Ronghi faces a possible sentence of life in prison, or life without the possibility of parole, Patton said.
He also is expected to face a reduction in rank to private, forfeiture of all pay and allowances and a dishonorable discharge, she said.
Ronghi was charged with killing Merita Shabiu on Jan. 13 in the basement of an apartment building and burying her body in the snow near the town of
Vitina. He was arrested just days after the killing.
A native of Niles, Ohio, Ronghi was a weapons squad leader assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment at Fort Bragg, N.C., and was serving with U.S. peacekeeping forces at the time of the killing.
The girl's death raised tensions between peacekeeping troops in Kosovo and ethnic Albanians. Ethnic Albanians in the province already had been critical of other alleged mistreatment, including inappropriate body searches of women since the
50,000-person NATO-led force entered Kosovo in June 1999.
Ronghi had been held since January at the U.S. Army's Confinement in Mannheim. He is currently confined in
Wuerzburg, 60 miles west of Frankfurt, where he will be sentenced. U.S. military personnel convicted of murder normally serve their sentences in Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., the military's top high-security prison.
