Iraqi judge seeks arrest of British soldiers

By Abdel-Razzak Hameed

BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) – An Iraqi judge has issued arrest
warrants for two British soldiers freed after a British raid in
Basra, an Iraqi lawyer said on Saturday, and thousands rallied
in the southern city in support of a new constitution.

Judge Raghib Hassan issued the warrants on Thursday,
accusing the men of killing an Iraqi policeman and wounding
another, carrying unlicensed weapons and holding false
identification, Kassim al-Sabti, the head of the lawyers’
syndicate in Basra told Reuters.

Britain’s Ministry of Defense said on Saturday it had not
received any arrest warrants for the soldiers in Basra, adding
that in any case the warrants would have no legal basis.

“All British troops in Iraq come under the jurisdiction of
Britain,” a defense spokesman said in London.

The whereabouts of the two soldiers was not clear.

British forces mounted a bid to free the two soldiers on
Monday, but were initially repelled as a crowd of angry Iraqis
petrol-bombed an armored vehicle.

Later British forces returned and armored vehicles broke
down the walls of the jail. The two were later freed from a
private house nearby, where they were believed to have been
held by a local militia.

Basra authorities said British troops killed two Iraqi
police during the raid.

Monday’s flare-up has harmed the relationship British
forces were able to build with local Iraqis in and around
Basra, a relatively stable city compared with other parts of
Iraq.

Basra’s governing council has suspended all cooperation
with the British until they apologize, guarantee that similar
actions do not recur and provide compensation for damage
inflicted.

Two investigations into the events leading up to the rescue
are under way by Iraqi authorities and the British military.

Iraqi police said U.S. troops killed a family of four in
Kerbala, south of Baghdad, on Saturday, reflecting military
nerves on edge across the country.

Police said the family’s passenger car apparently got too
close to a U.S. convoy, which opened fire, killing a father and
mother and their 13-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter.

RALLY FOR CONSTITUTION

Basra is the largest city in majority-Shi’ite southern
Iraq, and thousands of citizens rallied on Saturday in support
of a proposed new Iraqi constitution which many Shi’ites hope
will boost their status in the fragmented country.

The rally followed calls last week by Iraq’s most senior
Shi’ite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to vote in favor of
the charter, which will be put to a referendum on Oct 15.

Shi’ites were suppressed under Saddam Hussein, who banned
major religious ceremonies at the holy cities of Najaf and
Kerbala and crushed a Shi’ite revolt in 1991. Such ceremonies
have drawn crowds of a million or more since he was ousted.

Iraq’s U.S.-backed government is dominated by southern
Shi’ites and Kurds from the north — to the dismay of the
minority Sunni Arabs, who make up just 20 percent of the
population but have dominated Iraq for decades.

Their influence has all but disappeared since Saddam fell.
Many Sunnis fear if the constitution is approved at the
referendum, it will formalize their reduced role by giving
Shi’ites broad autonomy in line with that already enjoyed by
Kurds — including control over oil revenues.

The government and its U.S. military backers face a Sunni
insurgency across the country, in which daily bombings and
shootings kill police, soldiers and civilians.

On Saturday morning, a suicide car bomb exploded near an
Iraqi army checkpoint in Baghdad, killing two Iraqi soldiers
and wounding five other people, police said.

The attack, near a restaurant in the capital’s Karrada
district, destroyed several cars and sent up a plume of smoke.

Three soldiers and two civilians were wounded, police said.
Iraqi police and the U.S. military sealed off the area.

The blast followed an attack on Friday in which a suicide
bomber blew himself up at a bus station, killing at least five
people and wounding 17, police said.

Separately, a U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb
southeast of Baghdad, the U.S. military said on Saturday.

The death raises to 1,911 the number of U.S. troops to have
died in Iraq since the start of the war.

(Additional reporting by Aseel Kami in Baghdad and Matthew
Jones in London)