|
Apparent iraqi death squad discovered { February 17 2006 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/02/17/apparent_iraqi_death_squad_discovered_us_spokesman_says/http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/02/17/apparent_iraqi_death_squad_discovered_us_spokesman_says/
Apparent Iraqi death squad discovered, US spokesman says
By Nelson Hernandez and Bassam Sebti, Washington Post | February 17, 2006
BAGHDAD -- US and Iraqi authorities discovered an apparent death squad operating within the country's Interior Ministry last month, when Iraqi troops stopped a group of highway patrol officers from killing a Sunni Arab man they had arrested, a US military spokesman said yesterday.
The 22 men, dressed in the camouflage uniforms of special police commandos, were stopped by chance at an Iraqi Army checkpoint in northern Baghdad, according to Major General Joseph Peterson, who gave a detailed account of the incident to the Chicago Tribune for an article published yesterday. When the soldiers asked the police what they were doing, they responded bluntly: They were going to execute their captive. Instead, they wound up in jail.
The men's arrest was first reported this month in The New York Times, which also quoted Peterson, who oversees the training of Iraqi police. The general outlines of the arrest were confirmed yesterday in an e-mail message from Peterson and by Major General Rick Lynch, a US military spokesman.
This appeared to be the first hard evidence to support the suspicion among Sunni Arabs that vigilantes in the country's Shi'ite-dominated police forces are rounding up Sunnis and killing them.
The bodies of Sunni men -- bound, shot and left in dumpsters, on side streets and in patches of desert -- have turned up frequently since the middle of last year, shortly after the Shi'ite-led government was named in April. Such discoveries have been made almost daily in recent months, and police found four bodies yesterday, two in Baghdad, according to the Reuters news service.
Sunni leaders estimate that 1,600 people have been killed in what they say is a campaign of sectarian violence.
Survivors often say their attackers were dressed in police uniforms and drove police vehicles. Interior Ministry officials have countered that the clothes are easily available on the street and suggest that the killings are committed by criminals or militia fighters posing as police.
But Peterson said the reported attack in late January was a clear-cut case. Four ringleaders in the group of men who posed as special police commandos are now in US custody at Abu Ghraib prison, Lynch said. The 18 others, along with the Sunni man, who is accused of murder, are being held in an Iraqi jail.
The Chicago Tribune quoted Peterson as saying that the four men held by US authorities were apparently loyal to the Badr Organization, which is affiliated with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the most powerful party in the country's governing Shi'ite coalition.
The Interior Ministry ''will investigate whether they actually work for the Interior Ministry or claim that," Major General Hussein Kamal, a deputy head of the ministry, said in an interview.
Shi'ite militias such as the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army function as the armed wings of political parties
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
|
|
