William Calley, former US Army officer, the only person convicted of the infamous My Lai massacre of civilians during the Vietnam Wardied at the age of 80, the American press reported yesterday Monday.

He died on April 28 in Gainesville, Florida, but the fact was not known until a recent search of public records, the Washington Post says.

On March 16, 1968, in the midst of the Vietnam War (1955-1975), William Calley, then a lieutenant in the US Army, ordered his men to kill villagers in My Lai because of mistaken intelligence that insurgents Viet Cong were hiding among civilians.

Although no evidence of the presence of enemy combatants was found by the Americans, villagers were tortured, raped, slaughtered by the hundreds.

The tally – still disputed to this day – is estimated by American sources to have been 347 and by Vietnamese sources to have reached 504 civilian dead.

They were mostly women, children and the elderly.

William Calley was the only American soldier to be convicted, in 1971, of this crime, which was covered up for over a year by the US military, presented as a “victory” in the war by General William Westmoreland.

He testified at the military court that he simply obeyed the orders of his superiors.

A dozen other military personnel had been indicted for crimes related to the massacre – including its cover-up – but were acquitted.

William Calley was convicted of the murders of 22 civilians and sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labour. However, his sentence was changed just a few days later, by a decision of the then president Richard Nixon. He was released after three years of house arrest.

He apologized during a speech in Columbus in 2009.

Photo source Wikipedia