IRAQ: Armed men in camouflage uniforms similar to those of police commandos abducted up to 50 employees of a private security firm in eastern Baghdad yesterday. Jonathan Steele reports.
The abductions came less than 24 hours after 18 blindfolded bodies were found in an abandoned lorry in a western suburb. The slaughter was the latest in a series of killings, apparently by death squads, which has sent fear through the city.
Small groups of people have been periodically tortured and murdered in recent months, in addition to the many assassinated individually.
But the discovery of large numbers of victims at one time is a relatively new development, suggesting planning and co-ordination organised by larger teams of killers.
An American army patrol found the lorry with the 18 men, strangled and with their hands bound by plastic straps, in Amariya, a mainly Sunni district.
Yesterday's abduction took place at the al-Rawafid security company in the afternoon. The gunmen forced the employees into seven vehicles, according to Falah al-Mohammedawi of the interior ministry.
The company is in Zayouna, a mixed Sunni-Shia neighbourhood in east Baghdad, and its employees are said to include many former members of Saddam Hussein's security forces. Many Iraqis accuse the former dictator's intelligence agents of attacking Shia mosques and killing Shias to provoke sectarian tensions or in revenge for the killings of Sunnis.
Sectarian turbulence has escalated after a massive explosion destroyed a shrine in Samarra a fortnight ago. At least 500 people have died since then.
Police and hospital sources at the Yarmuk hospital morgue where the bodies from the lorry were laid out refused to speculate on their sectarian identities, for fear of sparking more alarm and revenge.
The victims carried no identifying papers, police said. But one officer pointed to the clothing and long hair of two men as an indication they may have been extremists linked to al-Qaeda.
Relatives identified one man, and said he worked at an oil refinery in south Baghdad. Some bodies were marked with small burns from cigarettes.
Last month UN officials quoted morgue sources as saying they had received a monthly average of at least 700 bodies since April last year, many showing signs of torture.
In its annual report outlining human rights abuses worldwide, the US state department said yesterday that killings by the Iraqi government or its agents had increased in 2005, and that members of sectarian militias dominated many police units.
"A climate of extreme violence in which people were killed for political and other reasons continued [in Iraq]," the report said.
"Police abuses included threats, intimidation, beatings and suspension by the arms or legs, as well as the reported use of electric drills and cords and the application of electric shocks."
The report did not list any abuses committed by the US.
Reports of death squads linked to the Shia-run interior ministry have been widespread for months. Two secret detention centres which it runs were uncovered in December.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador, has mounted a campaign to have the interior minister Bayan Jabr replaced when Iraq's new government is formed.
Mr Jabr is linked to the Badr brigade, a powerful militia loyal to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the main Shia parties.
Meanwhile, gunmen attacked the house of an interior minister official, Hikmat Moussa Salman, in western Baghdad yesterday killing two of his bodyguards.
Iraq's parliament has been called into session almost three months after the elections, but there is no sign of a breakthrough on who should be prime minister. By a margin of one vote, MPs in the largest block, an alliance of Shia parties, renominated the current prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, but Kurdish parties oppose him.