2 U.S. Civilians Slain by Men Said to Be Dressed as Iraqi Police

March 10, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS

ABU GHARIK, Iraq, March 10 — Two American civilians working for the Coalition Provisional Authority and an Iraqi interpreter were killed by what Iraqi police officials said today they believe were four men dressed as Iraqi police officers.

The civilians, two of them women, including the interpreter, were driving down from the holy city of Karbala in an unmarked, unprotected vehicle at 6:20 p.m. Tuesday evening when four men who had been following them opened fire at point-blank range, the police said.

The car, which was traveling on a divided highway, crossed over the median strip, crashed down an embankment and then ran about 70 yards across open ground until it hit an earth banking, where it came to rest.

Iraqi officers at a station a mile from the scene here said they had been alerted to the killings by a passing motorist who had seen the vehicle carrying the killers follow the Americans' vehicle off the road and resume shooting at the occupants after it had come to a halt.

The victims appeared to be headed for the regional headquarters of the coalition authority in Hilla, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, when the attack took place at this village about eight miles southwest of their destination.

The Iraqis say the attackers were dressed in the blue shirts and black trousers of the newly reconstituted Iraqi police service, which has been trained by the Americans.

Dan Senor, a spokesman for the occupation authority, said that identification of the victims would be withheld pending notification of next of kin. Mr. Senor also said that the occupation authorities were in the process of compiling a report on the killings and he could not at this stage confirm the Iraqi police account that identified the killers as wearing police uniforms.

At the time of the attack the civilians were about 15 miles northeast of Karbala in open country that runs through a landscape of palm groves, wheatfields and natural water pools. There is a fairly heavy stream of traffic on that road at that time of day and evening.

Karbala was the scene last week of the killing of more than 100 people by suicide bombings and other attacks on one of the holiest Shiite celebrations last week.

Blame for those attacks has been placed by United States officials on associates of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Islamic militant with a $10 million ransom on his head. He has been identified by the Americans as responsible for many of the worst terror attacks across Iraq in the past year, including the bombings in Baghdad of the headquarters of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

American officials in Baghdad said the two American victims were the first civilian employees of the American occupation authority to have been killed in Iraq since the American invasion began nearly a year ago.

They said the only other death among American employees of the provisional authority occurred in October, when an American military officer working at the authority's Baghdad headquarters was killed by a rocket that hit the Al Rashid Hotel during the stay there of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul S. Wolfowitz.

A senior Iraqi police officer, seated in his office in a sandbagged compound close to the scene of the killings here, said the police believed that the killers had waited to carry out the shootings until the victims were in open countryside with nightfall approaching to impede pursuit by investigators.

The senior officer, identified only as Brigadier Qais, said that the area around Abu Gharik, which is overwhelmingly Shiite, had previously been spared the bombings and other terrorist attacks that had made Hilla and towns on the road north to Baghdad, with mixed Shiite and Sunni populations, one of the most dangerous areas in Iraq for Americans and other Westerners, as well as for Iraqis at police stations and other installations associated with the American occupation.

The Iraqi accounts of the attack offered further evidence of a pattern that American officers have said makes the terrorists and pro-Hussein insurgents particularly formidable, with their ability to adapt quickly to new techniques of attack as the Americans and their allies identify patterns in previous attacks and stiffen their defenses against them.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company