A United States-based private security firm received a contract worth up to US$92 million from the Department of Defense amid hard questions about its involvement in two separate violent incidents in Iraq.

“Blackwater [USA] has been a contractor in the past with the department and could certainly be in the future,” said the US’s top-ranking military officer, General Peter Pace, last week.

The future arrived just two hours later when the Pentagon released a new list of contracts - Presidential Airways, the aviation unit of parent Blackwater, was awarded the contract to fly Department of Defense passengers and cargo around Central Asia.

The announcement comes as a cloud of suspicion gathers around the “professional military” firm for its actions as a State Department security contractor in Iraq in which at least eight Iraqis and possibly as many as 28 were killed, including a woman and child.

The Iraqi government initially announced that it had revoked Blackwater’s license to operate in the country. The initial report on the incident by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security was put together by the US Embassy in Baghdad and details of the event in which a car bomb exploded near a meeting attended by officials from the US Agency for International Development. Some of the Blackwater team members hired as security for the officials were involved in the shootout while apparently trying to clear an evacuation path.

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