The FBI will investigate links between the bomb massacre in the Iraqi city of Najaf and the deadly attacks on the United Nations’ Baghdad headquarters and Jordan’s embassy, the top FBI agent in Iraq said on Sunday.
”We’ll be obtaining samples if we can of the explosives used [in Najaf] and will be submitting that to laboratory analysis, and comparing it with samples taken from other bombings,” Tom Fuentes said.
Fuentes said he had been asked to help Iraqi police in their bid to find out who planted the bomb in the holy city of Najaf that killed at least 83 people on Friday.
”Whoever they [the Iraqi police] have we’ll be looking to see if they’re members of any known terrorist group. We’ll analyse them through terrorist databases to see if they’re identified terrorists,” he said.
Iraqi police said at least two Saudis were among 19 people detained in connection with the car bombing in Najaf, in which leading Shiite cleric and politician Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim was blown to bits.
Fuentes said the FBI had been asked to help in the probe by the Coalition Provisional Authority, which had received the request from the governor of Najaf Haider Mehadi Mattar.
Fuentes is already helping the Iraqi police in the probes into the August 19 suicide truck bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad and the Jordan embassy car bomb blast on August 7 that kicked off the recent wave of car explosions in Iraq.
Twenty-two people, including the UN special envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, died in the UN attack. At least 14 people died at Jordan’s embassy.
He said the details of the FBI’s involvement would become clearer after he held further discussions with Paul Bremer, the top US official in Iraq; with the Najaf governor; and the head of Iraq’s fledgling police force.
The FBI agent said it would take another one to two weeks before results came back from laboratories in Washington analysing explosives samples taken from the bombings of the UN building and the Jordanian embassy.
Fuentes on Saturday refused to speculate on who was responsible for the Najaf blast, which also wounded more than 200 people, saying only that there were many groups capable of such an attack.
”Just start a list. Many groups are capable. There’s no shortage of people [in Iraq] capable of conducting a bombing like this,” he said.
On Sunday tens of thousands turned out in Baghdad and the holy city of Karbala for funeral marches for Hakim, who is due to be buried on Tuesday in Najaf. — Sapa-AFP