Police are targeted in fatal shootings
BAGHDAD -- In the latest assault on Iraq's US-trained security forces, gunmen killed four people in two separate attacks on police south of Baghdad yesterday.
A senior US official, meanwhile, said investigators were studying videotape of Iraqis mutilating the bodies of four American contract workers killed Wednesday in Fallujah, trying to identify participants.
The charred remains of the Americans were dragged through the streets for hours after insurgents ambushed their vehicles. Two corpses were hung from a bridge.
There was no sign of any US military activity in the Fallujah area to suggest retaliatory action was imminent. Chief US administrator L. Paul Bremer III has said those who killed the four civilians and burned their bodies "will not go unpunished."
In the first attack on police yesterday, the department chief of Mahmoudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad, was driving from the capital to his home when gunmen killed him and his driver, police Lieutenant Ala'a Hussein said.
Not long afterward, six attackers shot at a four-man police patrol in Mahmoudiya, killing one and wounding three, police officer Khaldoon al-Gurairi said. A 60-year-old bystander was also killed.
Guerrillas have often targeted police, because they view them as collaborators with the US-led occupation. They are less well-armed than the US troops.
More than 350 policemen have been killed by shootings and suicide bombings since the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime last year, and some Iraqi officials put the toll much higher. On March 24, nine police recruits were killed when gunmen shot up their vehicle in southern Babil province.
The violence has not stopped Iraqis from seeking police jobs. In the southern city of Basra, unemployed men demanding jobs on the force clashed with Iraqi security forces yesterday, police Colonel Ali Kahdum said. Three protesters were hurt. For tens of thousands of unemployed in Iraq, a policeman's minimum monthly wage of $120 is a high incentive. The pay is almost twice that of new teachers.
