dingsda

Donnerstag, Januar 20, 2005

Allawi allegedly killed 6 terrorist suspects

Jon Lee Anderson, a reporter for The New Yorker, writes in a recent dossier about Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, that he shot 6 terrorist suspects in a Baghdad prison. The killings took place about a week before Allawi took office in June last year.

The story was first reported last July by Paul McGeough in the Sydney Morning Herald. According two to people who claimed to have witnessed the killings:
[...] the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs.

[...]

"The prisoners were against the wall and we were standing in the courtyard when the Interior Minister said that he would like to kill them all on the spot. Allawi said that they deserved worse than death - but then he pulled the pistol from his belt and started shooting them."

Beside the Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib about a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from Allawi's security team watched this event the latter "in stunned silence".

The story was, of course, denied by Iraqi officials, but rumors about it had persisted ever since.

Now, according to Anderson in The New Yorker:

[...] a well-known former [Jordan] government minister told me that an American official had confirmed that the killings took place, saying to him, “What a mess we’re in—we got rid of one son of a bitch only to get another.”