The alleged ringleader a soldier discharged for a ''personality disorder'' before the slaying was discovered faces the death penalty in a trial set to begin with jury selection today.

Four other soldiers have already been sentenced in the March 2006 atrocity. The plan was allegedly devised over whiskey and a game of cards at a checkpoint in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad.

Specialist James Barker, who received a life sentence for his role in the crime, said Specialist Steven Green told his friends he ''wanted to go to a house and kill some Iraqis''. The soldiers changed into black silk underwear and masks so they would look like insurgents and headed for the house of a 14-year-old girl. Sergeant Paul Cortez, who also received a life sentence, said they decided the girl would make an easy target for their plan to ''have sex with an Iraqi female'' because her father was the only man in the house. Cortez testified he raped Abeer Kassem Hamza al-Janabi while Barker pinned the sobbing girl to the floor.

He said the men switched positions then heard four or five shots from a bedroom where Green had taken the girl's father, mother and six-year-old sister.

Green shot the girl when he finished raping her and the soldiers set the home on fire by tossing a lighter on to a kerosene-soaked blanket covering her naked body.

He was arrested by the FBI in North Carolina saying, ''You probably think I'm a monster'' and that ''George Bush and Dick Cheney ought to be the ones arrested'', court records show. AFP