Blackwater chairman and CEO Erik Prince has come out swinging at growing accusations that his contractors in Iraq are trigger-happy cowboys who fired without provocation on unarmed civilians last month in Baghdad, killing 17 people and wounding 27.

Mr Prince speculated that the attorneys representing four victims in a lawsuit against him and Blackwater only want to score political points and get media attention. He also suggested that the US military, which was on the scene minutes after the September 16 incident in Nisoor Square, did not conduct a thorough investigation.

Mr Prince insists that his contractors came under fire that day, forcing the contractors to fire back and disabling one vehicle that had to be towed away.

“Well, all I can say is in the incident reports I’ve seen, at least three of our armored vehicles were hit by small arms fire, incoming, and one of them damaged, which actually delayed their departure from the traffic circle while they tried to rig a tow,” he told CNN. “So there was definitely incoming small arms fire from insurgents.”

This version of events has been rejected by the US military and the Iraqi government, who conducted immediate investigations at the scene following the shootings.

Military officials said there is no evidence that Blackwater came under fire, and that the evidence gathered points to excessive force by the contractors – including clear evidence that people were shot while trying to flee.

Mr Prince dismissed this assessment as inconclusive. “It was a very big traffic circle,” he said. “I think they would need almost a battalion to secure that entire area, to do a thorough crime scene type investigation. So the jury is still out.”

He also said that attorneys who agreed to represent four victims of the shootings of are motivated by a political agenda and a desire for publicity: “The lawyers … that filed this lawsuit are the same guys that defended the World Trade Center bombings in 1993, the blind sheikh, and defended a bunch of killers of FBI agents and other cops. So this is very much a politically motivated lawsuit, for media attention.”

Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the victims, responded that the Center had not defended Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in 1995 in relation to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

He said Mr Prince was attacking the Center in an attempt to deflect attention from the substance of the lawsuit, which accuses Mr Prince and Blackwater of “extrajudicial killings and war crimes” and claims they “created and fostered a culture of lawlessness amongst employees”.

“This reckless mercenary corporation has run amok in Iraq, further destroying our reputation in the world, further destabilizing the area, and making it less safe for US soldiers and Iraqi civilians alike,” Mr Warren told Reuters. “The time for Blackwater’s accountability has come.”

Mr Prince is adamant that he and his contractors “support accountability”. He said they believe they are “accountable under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act and under the Uniform Code of Military Justice”.

Yet it is widely understood that neither the MEJA (in its current form) nor the UCMJ applies to State Department contractors such as Blackwater.

Legislation recently passed by the House of Representatives by a vote of 389-30 would extend the MEJA to hold contractors employed by the State Department accountable under the US criminal code, although the bill is expected to encounter opposition on the Senate floor and from the Bush administration who “strongly opposes” the legislation.

Meanwhile, the issue of accountability appears to have come between Blackwater and one of its staunchest advocates in the firestorm ignited by the September 16 shootings.

Last week, Blackwater abruptly withdrew its membership from the International Peace Operations Association, a trade association for private security contractors, two days after the organization decided to conduct an independent review of the Nisoor Square shootings.

Although IPOA’s press release does not explicitly state that the company severed ties with IPOA to block the investigation, the bulk of the statement seems to suggest that the timing and the circumstances of the company’s withdrawal may have been related to the forthcoming review.

The IPOA statement begins with an announcement that Blackwater withdrew its membership effective October 10. It continues, “On October 8 … the IPOA Executive Committee authorized the Standards Committee to initiate an independent review process of Blackwater USA to ascertain whether Blackwater USA’s processes and procedures were fully sufficient to ensure compliance with the IPOA Code of Conduct … All IPOA member companies are required to follow the IPOA Code of Conduct.”

A Blackwater spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal, “We have decided to take a hiatus from the association. We, like many other organizations engaged in this type of work, are pursuing other aspects and methods of industry outreach and governance.”