Mystery as men in police uniform raid Baghdad firm

By Mariam Karouny

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Armed men in police uniform seized
dozens of Iraqi private security guards from their firm’s
compound on Wednesday, police said, but officials contradicted
each other over whether they were arrested or kidnapped.

Three of the most senior officials in the Interior Ministry
insisted no raid was authorized on the company in Baghdad. Two
other officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the
private guards had been arrested by genuine police commandos.

One senior official in the Interior Ministry said police
raided the company after a complaint from a corporate client
dissatisfied with the firm’s security services.

But Major General Mohammed al-Hassan, the ministry’s head
of operations, said in a statement: “The Interior Ministry is
not involved in any way in this arrest.”

The confusion was not unusual in matters relating to Iraq’s
security forces, which were accused in a U.S. State Department
report on Wednesday of widespread torture and other abuses.

The U.S.-backed Iraqi government has admitted that some
units have operated beyond its control.

Police officers working at their Baghdad headquarters said
witnesses and patrol officers had reported that about 50
employees of the security firm had been taken away from their
headquarters by men in uniform driving police pick-up trucks.

Many Iraqis, especially in the Sunni minority, fear police
from the Shi’ite-run Interior Ministry. The ministry says many
accounts of gunmen in police uniform abducting and killing
civilians are the result of insurgents stealing their uniforms.

The discovery of the bodies of 18 men, tortured and
strangled, in a minibus near a Sunni insurgent stronghold in
Baghdad, prompted renewed comment on Wednesday about police
abuses, although the victims’ identities were unclear.

In a measure of the problems the police face, one senior
Interior Ministry official, who said no official raid had been
authorized, questioned why the security company employees had
surrendered to the uniformed force without a fight.

“I don’t know what happened,” he told Reuters. “But what
sort of security firm was it anyway when they didn’t even
defend themselves when people tried to get into the compound,
whether they were in police uniform or not? They deserve all
they get.”

(Additional reporting by Lutfi Abu Oun and Faris
al-Mehdawi)