One of the journalists who wrote this was killed in Baghdad.
======= Posted on Tue, Jun. 28, 2005
Sectarian payback suspected in Iraq
SUNNIS REPORTEDLY ARE KILLED BY MEN IN POLICE UNIFORMS
By Tom Lasseter and Yasser Salihee
Knight Ridder
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Days after Iraq's new Shiite-led government was announced April 28, the bodies of Sunni Muslim men began turning up at the capital's central morgue after the men had been detained by people wearing Iraqi police uniforms.
Faik Baqr, the director and chief forensic investigator at the central Baghdad morgue, said the corpses first caught his attention because the men appeared to have been killed in methodical fashion. Their hands had been tied or handcuffed behind their backs, the victims were blindfolded and they appeared to have been tortured. In most cases, the dead men looked as if they had been whipped with a cord, subjected to electric shocks or beaten with a blunt object and shot to death, often with single bullets to their heads.
Marks on the bodies were similar to the injuries found on prisoners who were rescued from secret Interior Ministry jails by representatives of the Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights, according to family accounts and medical records.
Iraqi and American officials said the killings are not being investigated systematically, but in dozens of interviews with families and Iraqi officials, and a review of medical records, a Knight Ridder reporter and two correspondents found more than 30 examples of this type of killing in less than a week. They include 12 cases with specific dates, times, names and witnesses who said they might come forward if asked by law enforcement.
The Interior Ministry, which oversees the Iraqi police, denies any involvement in the killings. But witnesses said many of the dead were apprehended by large groups of men driving white Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings. The men were wearing police commando uniforms and bulletproof vests, carrying expensive 9mm Glock pistols and using sophisticated radios, the witnesses said.
U.S. officials, who have advisers in the Interior Ministry, have said they are aware of the abductions and killings, but that they think the killings are the work of insurgents posing as police.
``The small numbers that we've investigated we've found to be either rumor or innuendo,'' said Steven Casteel, a senior U.S. adviser to the ministry and former Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence chief. ``You can buy a police uniform in 20 different places in the market.''
While he admitted that Interior Ministry troops have at times abused detainees, Casteel said he knew of only one instance in which they had falsely detained an Iraqi and beat him. And in that case, the troops and their commander were convicted and jailed, he said.
Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, a Shiite, saw family members killed by Saddam Hussein's regime and has little patience for human rights violations, Casteel said.
Saddam's security forces tortured and killed thousands of Shiite Muslims, and the Sunni-led insurgency has slain thousands in car bombs, assassinations, beheadings and drive-by shootings during the past two years.
The killings and the allegations about who is committing them add another explosive element to Iraq's growing sectarian strife at a time when the Bush administration has begun saying that it is up to the Iraqi government to defeat the insurgency by attracting broader popular support, especially from Sunni Arabs.
Evidence that a police force created, trained and funded by the United States has been abusing human rights, on the other hand, would complicate the Bush administration's efforts to muster greater domestic support for its Iraq policy and more international support for the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Raad Sultan, an official in Iraq's Ministry of Human Rights who monitors the treatment of Iraqis in prisons and detention centers, said some Interior Ministry employees have tortured Iraqis whom they suspect of supporting the insurgency.
Officials in the Interior Ministry's intelligence division deny having detainees, saying they only question those in Iraqi prisons. But one investigation by the Human Rights Ministry found 32 detainees, and another found 67 in Interior Ministry intelligence facilities. The majority of the detainees had been tortured, Sultan said.
Yasser Salihee was a Knight Ridder correspondent. He was shot and killed last week in Baghdad in circumstances that remain unclear. |
