2 American Civilians Killed by Fake Iraqi Policemen

March 11, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS

ABU GHARAQ, Iraq, March 10 — Two American civilians and their Iraqi interpreter were killed on Tuesday night in what American officials described as a "targeted killing" by terrorists posing as Iraqi police officers. They were the first American civilians working for the American occupation authority to be killed since American forces toppled Saddam Hussein last April.

The three were attacked as they drove past this settlement 70 miles south of Baghdad on their way from work assignments in Karbala.

By some accounts, including those from Polish officers of the allied force that controls the Karbala area, the victims died in a volley of gunfire as they halted at an improvised checkpoint set up with rocks dragged onto the road. Iraqi police officers based nearby said the lethal shots came from a chasing car.

An officer from the Polish contingent said the attackers placed the bodies of all three victims in the trunk of the Americans' Korean-built car and drove off. The officer, Col. Robert Strzelecki, said Polish troops later intercepted the car and arrested five men suspected of being the killers. He did not say whether the men were Iraqis or foreigners.

"The attackers disguised as Iraqi policemen had set up a false checkpoint," Colonel Strzelecki told Agence France-Presse. Other Polish officers said the captured men had been handed over to American forces.

The American occupation authority indicated that the killings were of a new sort. At an evening news briefing, Dan Senor, a spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the authority's administrator, described the killings as "a targeted act of terrorism." He added that although the F.B.I. would be working with the Iraqi police in the probe, "We believe that this act is under U.S. jurisdiction." That was a reference, American officials said, to United States laws that provide for the extradition of anybody found guilty of a terrorist attack against an American official and that allow for the death penalty.

A reporter reaching the scene on Wednesday was taken by the Iraqi police to a spot near Abu Gharaq where the road from Karbala runs past open wheat fields and palm groves. There, near a side road traveled by donkey carts, tire tracks said to have come from the Americans' car curved sharply left across the median strip, over the lanes for oncoming traffic, and down a five-foot embankment. The car appeared to have run on across muddy ground for another 50 yards before hitting a second embankment and stopping.

The two dead Americans, a woman and a man described by United States officials as being employed by the Pentagon, and the interpreter, an Iraqi woman, were not otherwise identified. Officials in Baghdad said their names and details of their deaths would be released only after their families had been informed and a team of F.B.I. investigators had composed a fuller picture of exactly what happened.

One account circulating in Baghdad was that at least one of the dead at Abu Gharaq was an F.B.I. official, and that Mr. Bremer had called to offer condolences to the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III.

According to a official tally kept by the Pentagon, 553 American soldiers have been killed in the invasion of Iraq and the occupation. No reliable figures for the numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths have been kept by the Americans, or by any Iraqi organization, but rough estimates range from about 10,000 to as high as 20,000.

According to the Iraqi police, Abu Gharaq had previously been spared terrorist bombings, ambushes and shootings. At dusk Wednesday, 24 hours after the killings, the agrarian stillness along the road here seemed a universe away from Karbala, 20 miles to the west, which has been the target of several major attacks.

The dangers in Iraq have been increasing for civilians, both Iraqi and foreign, seen as working for the occupiers. Last week in Baghdad, an Iraqi working as an interpreter for the Voice of America was shot dead, together with his mother-in-law and 4-year-old daughter, by men who followed them and opened fire as they drove home at night.

Increasingly, other Iraqis who work for foreigners have been receiving death threats, and some have quit their jobs, and even fled Iraq, rather than face execution as "traitors" and "accomplices" of the Americans, as warning notes have called them.

After suicide bombings in Karbala last week that killed at least 120 Iraqis, and after a nearly simultaneous attack in Baghdad that killed another 65 Iraqis, American officials said that an F.B.I. team, including forensic experts, had gone to Karbala to assist the Iraqi police in their investigation.

Mr. Senor, the spokesman for Mr. Bremer, said F.B.I. investigators had also been sent to Abu Gharaq. But that is routine when American officials are killed abroad.

If an F.B.I. official was one of those killed on Wednesday, it raises questions about whether the killings were linked to the Karbala and Baghdad bombings — and, in particular, whether they could have been directed by the man the Americans have named as the prime suspect in the bombings, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Mr. Zarqawi is a Jordanian-born Muslim militant accused of having ties to Al Qaeda, and American officials posted a $10 million reward for his capture or death after linking him to a series of suicide bombings, including attacks last year on the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The reward was offered after United States forces here intercepted a letter that Mr. Zarqawi was said to have written late last year in which he urged Al Qaeda to support attacks on Shiite targets with the goal of provoking a civil war between the Shiite and Sunnis in order to disrupt the American push to establish a Western-style democracy here.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company