Two Britons were killed and three injured on Monday when gunmen attacked a bus carrying Muslim pilgrims south of Baghdad, police and hospital officials said, the day after four humanitarian workers were reported kidnapped.
The gunmen attacked the bus when it neared a checkpoint in the Dora neighbourhood, police Captain Talib Thamir said. The bus was carrying Shi’ite Muslim pilgrims to religious sites south of the capital, he said.
Four men and one woman, apparently of South Asian heritage and carrying United Kingdom passports, were taken to Baghdad’s Yarmouk hospital, an official there said.
”We were just coming and all of a sudden heard shots and immediately got down,” said the injured British woman, who identified herself as Z Jafferti. ”I don’t know what happened and I couldn’t see anything.”
She said she had been ill and had come to Iraq to pray at the shrines to Imam Ali and Imam Hussein.
Also on Monday morning, a mortar shell fell in central Baghdad’s Green Zone and two others fell nearby, just hours before Saddam Hussein’s trial was set to begin. There were no reports of injuries from the shelling, police Lieutenant Bilal Ali Majeed said.
While collecting reaction to the Saddam trial, gunmen opened fire on a crew from state-run Iraqiya television. Police Captain Qassim Hussein said two men were killed and one was seriously wounded.
A roadside bomb also detonated next to a passing United States Army convoy in north-eastern Baghdad on Monday, setting fire to a Bradley fighting vehicle. Police Captain Mohammed Abdul-Ghani said three soldiers were injured, but no other information was immediately available.
Kidnapping
The US embassy on Monday confirmed that a US civilian was missing in Iraq, the day after a Canadian Parliament official said four humanitarian workers, including two Canadians, had been kidnapped in Iraq. A Briton was also confirmed missing by British officials.
The US statement did not provide any additional details.
Dan McTeague, parliamentary secretary for Canadians abroad, said the incident happened on Saturday, but refused to name the organisation the two Canadians worked for or the location where they were kidnapped.
He said he wouldn’t release those details in order to protect the safety of the individuals involved. McTeague said the organisation has not requested any assistance at this time.
Briton Norman Kember was among the four, the British government said on Sunday. His wife said he was representing a number of groups in the country and was a long-time peace activist.
Elizabeth Colton, a US embassy spokesperson, said the US was investigating whether an American also was among the missing.
Rebecca Johnson, of an organisation called Christian Peacemakers, couldn’t confirm whether its workers were the ones kidnapped. She said the organisation has a team of four to six people in Baghdad.
Most international organisations fled Iraq last year following a wave of kidnappings and beheadings of foreign and Iraqi hostages.
Many of them were carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The US military reported that a marine assigned to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing was killed on Saturday when his vehicle struck a roadside bomb near Camp Taqaddum, 72km west of Baghdad.
At least 2 106 US military personnel have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
According to the United Kingdom-based Iraq Body Count website, between 27 115 and 30 559 ordinary Iraqis have died since the invasion in March 2003.
Near Kirkuk, 290km north of Baghdad, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division found more than 2 700 mortar rounds buried near an abandoned Iraqi army base, a US statement said. Troops were excavating similar mounds on Monday in search of more weapons, it added.
Brutality
In an interview published on Sunday, Ayad Allawi, a secular Shi’ite Muslim, told the London newspaper The Observer that fellow Shi’ites are responsible for death squads and secret torture centres, and said brutality by elements of Iraqi security forces rivals that of Saddam’s secret police.
”People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same thing,” the newspaper quoted Allawi as saying.
Allawi’s allegation of widespread human rights abuses follows the discovery this month of up to 173 detainees, some malnourished and showing signs of torture, in a Shi’ite-led interior ministry building in Baghdad.
”People are doing the same as Saddam’s time and worse,” he said. ”It is an appropriate comparison.”
His remarks appeared aimed at winning favour among the Sunni Arab minority as well as secular Shi’ites ahead of the December 15 parliamentary elections. Allawi is running on a secular ticket that includes several prominent Sunnis.
During his tenure as prime minister, Allawi lost the support of many Shi’ites because he brought back former members of Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime back into the security services to bolster the fight against insurgents.
There was no comment from Shi’ite politicians on Allawi’s interview. However, the leader of Iraq’s biggest Shi’ite party said allegations of torture were distortions and might be designed to draw attention away from the Saddam’s trial, which resumes on Monday after a five-week break.
”At the time of the Saddam trial, the issue of the torture in Iraqi detention centres is being exaggerated,” said Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. ”When it comes to the crimes committed by Saddam for decades in which millions of Iraqis were affected, there is complete silence.”
The remarks were broadcast on Sunday by the party’s television station. — Sapa-AP