Iraq’s leading Sunni Muslim groups reacted angrily on Tuesday to reports that 10 Sunni Arab men suffocated to death in the back of a police lorry in Baghdad’s sweltering summer heat.
The men are alleged to have died after being arrested by Iraqi anti-terrorist special forces on Sunday as they visited relatives at a hospital in the mainly Shia neighbourhood of Shula in north-western Baghdad.
A spokesperson for the conservative Association of Muslim Clerics said on Tuesday that 11 men had been rounded up after an incident in which US troops fired at a group of construction workers.
The men, aged between 20 and 30, were taken to a detention centre where they were tortured, he alleged.
They were then herded into a police truck for up to 14 hours, where they lost consciousness and and all but one died. The temperature outside was above 40C. The man who survived used his cellphone to alert family members.
An interior ministry spokesperson on Tuesday declined to comment on the deaths but officials in the Shia-dominated government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari promised a full investigation amid fears that the incident could further heighten sectarian tensions in the Iraqi capital.
The mainstream Iraqi Islamic party said on Tuesday: ”The whole world is witnessing Iraqi police committing an ugly crime. The Iraqi Islamic party condemns this savage crime and the barbaric way citizens are being treated.”
The Muslim clerics accused the police of conducting ”organised terrorism”.
The once all-powerful Sunni Arab community provides the backbone for the insurgency in Iraq, but moderate Sunnis complain that they are being unfairly branded as insurgents by the country’s nascent security services, which recruit mainly from the Shia majority.
Iraq’s harsh counter-insurgency campaign has also been heavily criticised by human rights groups after a wave of reports about the mistreatment and torture of detainees.
An official at the human rights ministry in Baghdad said: ”Under Saddam we feared and despised the police. What has changed?”
There has been a sharp increase in Sunni-Shia violence in and around Baghdad over the past three months, prompting leading religious figures to call for calm.
According to the Muslim clerics, the victims were among a group of construction workers who were shot at by United States forces on Saturday. Two of the men were wounded during the shooting, the cause of which remains unclear.
Police swooped the next day when the two injured men were visited in hospital by their colleagues.
”The men were just rounded up, beaten and stuffed into a baking truck,” said a relative on condition of anonymity. ”They had done nothing and were just visiting their friends.”
Police later took the victims to the Yarmouk hospital, in western Baghdad, where they informed doctors that the men were insurgents. The doctors said the bodies showed no signs of torture.
US forces were on Tuesday continuing to fight suspected militant targets in and around the north-west city of Tal-Afar, which is considered to be a prime supply route from Syria for the insurgency. The US claims to have killed nearly 20 militants in the offensive, which began on Sunday.
Meanwhile, another car bomb exploded in the disputed northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least three people, and a senior police officer was gunned down in Baghdad. And an US soldier was killed by a roadside bomb south of Baghdad.
The latest violence came as the Iraqi prime minister hinted that foreign troops could soon begin handing over security to Iraqi forces in some of the country’s safer cities. Jaafari said the process would be a ”first step” in encouraging Iraqis to control their own security but ruled out a timetable for complete withdrawal. – Guardian Unlimited Â