Four more Camp Pendleton Marines may face charges in the alleged April 26 kidnapping and murder of an Iraqi civilian, attorneys for two Marines already charged in the case said Friday.

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At Camp Pendleton, Lt. Col. Sean Gibson would only say that no additional charges have been filed against anyone and declined further comment. The attorneys who said that more charges are looming have close dealings with Marine Corps officials and have been involved in the case for months.

Victor Kelley, an attorney for one of the men, said Friday that he had been led to believe the additional troops, one of whom is an officer, may face a charge of conspiracy to commit murder.

Such a charge would suggest that the men were not directly involved in the alleged attack, but had knowledge it was being planned, according to Jane Siegel, a civilian defense attorney representing another of the men.

Siegel said Friday that she had been told the Marine Corps was making preparations to ensure that 12 members of Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment have military defense attorneys available. As of Friday, eight men have been charged and assigned military attorneys.

"I base that on the fact that I know that senior defense counsel leadership and the chief defense counsel of the Marine Corps are working to make sure that there are enough detailed defense counsel for that many defendants," said Siegel, a retired colonel who spent more than two decades as a Marine defense attorney and prosecutor.

Detailed defense counsel is a military term for uniformed attorneys appointed to represent troops accused of a crime.

"It would be some sort of conspiracy charge that says these men had knowledge that something was about to go down and their information would support the government's theory of the case," Siegel said.

On June 21, the Marine Corps announced it had filed murder, kidnapping, conspiracy and related charges against seven Marines and a Navy corpsman. The men from Kilo Company from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment have been in the Pendleton brig since May 24.

They are accused of conspiring to kidnap and kill 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad in the village of Hamdania. They are also alleged to have staged the scene with a shovel and an AK-47 assault rifle to make it appear Awad was killed while attempting to plant a roadside bomb.

If four more service members are charged, it would be the highest number of U.S. troops to be charged in a war crime in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.

In addition to Siegel and Kelley, two other people with intimate knowledge of the case said they also have been told that more Marines will be charged.

The men suspected in the killing were initially detained at Marine Corps base Camp Fallujah in Iraq. When they were returned to Pendleton, a base spokesman said that, in addition to those who were eventually charged, four members of the unit were restricted to base.

The four said to be facing the prospect of a criminal charge were initially considered material witnesses in the case. Their restriction to base was lifted by the Marine Corps in early June without explanation.

It was not immediately known if the four men said to be facing charges are the same Marines who were restricted to base in June.

The men already charged in the case are awaiting court proceedings known as Article 32 hearings to determine if the accusations against them will move ahead to courts-martial, or military trials. Those hearings are not expected to begin until mid-September or later.

Charged on June 21 were Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III, Cpls. Marshall Magincalda and Trent D. Thomas, Hospitalman 3rd Class Melson Bacos, Lance Cpls. Tyler A. Jackson, Robert B. Pennington and Jerry E. Shumate Jr., and Pfc. John J. Jodka III.

Kelley, who represents Thomas, hesitated to speculate as to when charges against others could be brought, but said his "best guess" was that it may happen before the hearings for those already charged.

If an officer is charged, "it has the potential of being very significant," Kelley said.

"The military law is that obedience to lawful orders is always a defense to allegations of misconduct," he said. "So, if Cpl. Thomas and the others were following lawful orders, that is an absolute defense."

One issue could be whether an order, if given, was lawful.

Kelley, whose firm is the National Military Justice Group in Birmingham, Ala., said that it is "not always clear on its face whether an order is lawful or not. Very often, it is a gray area."

As the Hamdania case moves forward, Marine Corps officials are awaiting the completion of a Naval Criminal Investigative Service probe into allegations that a different group of Camp Pendleton Marines may have committed crimes in the deaths of 24 Iraqis in the city of Haditha on Nov. 19.

In that case, as many as a dozen or more squad members from Camp Pendleton's 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment are alleged to have gone on a rampage after a roadside bomb killed a member of the unit.

No one has been charged in that case, in which the investigatory work is said to be weeks away from completion. An accompanying investigation conducted under the direction of a U.S. Army general into whether Marine commanders in Iraq failed to adequately investigate initial reports of the incident has been completed but remains under wraps pending completion of the criminal investigation.

- Contact staff writer Mark Walker at (760) 740-3529 or mlwalker@nctimes.com. Contact staff writer Teri Figueroa at (760) 631-6624 or tfigueroa@nctimes.com.