Iraqi police accused in killings

HILLA, Iraq — Security forces in this southern Iraqi city say criminals recruited into the city’s police force were responsible for the killing of two American civilians this week, contradicting initial reports that the killers were impostors in police uniforms.

Meanwhile, two U.S. soldiers were killed and another was wounded by a bomb in Habbaniyah, about 45 miles west of Baghdad late yesterday, the military said.

Fern Holland, a 33-year-old human rights expert from Oklahoma, and another American were killed along with their Iraqi translator on Tuesday by men in Iraqi police uniforms, according to witnesses. It was the first time that American civilian employees of the Coalition Provisional Authority have been killed in Iraq.

Authority officials said Wednesday that the three were fatally shot at a phony checkpoint between Hilla and Karbala by men posing as policemen, although by yesterday, officials were backing away from that version of events.

“They were in police uniforms. We haven’t established that it was the police,” Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander in Iraq, told reporters yesterday.

“We are very concerned about it,” he said. “We know that this has gone on … that there are some policemen that have done criminal acts in the past.”

Police commanders in Hilla, who arrested five men in uniform near the scene, went much further in interviews with United Press International.

“We were called to the scene, and the men were leaving,” said Police Col. Jauad Khadam. “We caught them on the road back to Karbala. They said they were Iraqi police and had come on the scene to help.”

One of the commander’s men then interrupted: “But we knew they were lying because their guns were hot and had just been fired. So we knew we had them.”

At the Hilla jail, where the men were held until Polish troops took them into custody, the guards insisted that the gunmen were known to them as real policemen.

“We knew some of them,” one man said. “Their commander [in Karbala] had been a criminal before Saddam [Hussein] left, so we knew his gang. They had been in jail here before.

“But then they got jobs as policemen in Karbala — we knew this before this happened. We couldn’t believe that the Americans gave police jobs to criminals like these.”

The U.S.-led coalition has embarked on a crash program to recruit and train 35,000 police officers to serve in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities within the next two years.

Because of the urgency of providing a security presence on the streets, it has been difficult to screen all candidates effectively. This week, the military said U.S. forces captured two members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps who were “suspected of conducting anticoalition activities.”

Story Continues →