Deaths spur calls to overhaul Iraqi police
BAGHDAD -- The Iraqi government's unprecedented admission that its police tortured and killed three Shi'ite Muslim militiamen while they were in custody has set off angry complaints from newly elected Shi'ite legislators who are engaged in a political battle for control of the police.
Shi'ite leaders have beamed gruesome images of the dead men to Iraqi television sets, displaying their bruised, scarred bodies as an argument for radically reshaping the police force, which is crucial to the fight against the country's bloody insurgency.
In a series of steps rarely seen in Iraq, US-backed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's interim government has acknowledged the men ''died under torture by police," arrested six police officers in the case, launched a high-level investigation, and paid the men's families about $2,000 each plus a $500 monthly stipend.
Yet the debate over the deaths last month is only beginning. Government officials insist the killings are an isolated case. But the leaders of the powerful Shi'ite Islamist bloc that won more than half the seats in the new National Assembly say the case reveals mistakes in the way Allawi and his US advisers recruited and trained Iraq's police. Those Shi'ite leaders say the force is a haven for Ba'athists who mistreated Iraqis, especially Shi'ites, under Saddam Hussein.
''Iraqis are being tortured by Iraqis, by the security groups which are responsible for their safety," said Hadi al-Ameri, head of the Badr Organization, an Iranian-trained militia founded in the 1980s as the armed wing of the Islamist party that is now the largest in the Shi'ite bloc.
''Under Saddam, we were used to prisoners being tortured until they died," he said. ''But the strange thing is that after Saddam, the same thing happens."
As the largest faction in the assembly, the Shi'ite bloc has the greatest say in naming the new Cabinet that will replace Allawi's, and some of its leaders want to make Ameri the interior minister, who will set police policy.
The killings of the three men -- all Badr members -- added an explosive element to the debate. Their families say they were deliberately targeted by police opposed to the rise of Shi'ite power.
The way the case is perceived could help determine whether the new government overhauls the Iraqi security forces created over the past two years or builds on the current foundation, as US officials and Allawi have urged.
It could also affect whether Iraq's Shi'ite majority is willing to risk handing a larger security role to members of Islamist militias like the Badr, which informally patrols many Baghdad neighborhoods and southern cities.
The 85,000-member police force is a mix of lightly-trained recruits and veterans of Hussein's security services who have more experience but carry the taint of the regime's abuses. Allawi insists the veterans have been carefully screened, but the Shi'ite bloc wants to purge many more.
Shi'ite leaders have publicized the killings to call for change.
Imams have extolled the three men as martyrs. An eight-minute video of their bloodied corpses has run at least 10 times on the Al Furat television channel, which belongs to the parent group of the Badr, dubbing them martyrs to Hussein's thugs.
But Sabah Kadhim, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said the three were killed by an officer who overreacted after he mistakenly arrested them during a firefight with Sunni Muslim insurgents, when, Kadhim said, ''everybody's blood was boiling."
''This case is not a case I would worry about," he said. ''You have to understand the Iraqi temperament. There is violence, an element of violence in every Iraqi."
Shi'ite parties are overemphasizing the case, he said, because ''they want to take this ministry."
Two recent reports, one issued in January by Human Rights Watch and the other by the US State Department last month, cite scores of reports of torture and arbitrary detention by Iraqi police and soldiers. Last year, the US report says, police executed 12 alleged kidnappers in Baghdad and took part in revenge killings of 10 Ba'athists in Basra.
But the Badr case stands out because Iraqi officials acknowledge that the men were tortured, and medical records detail the brutal beatings they received.
The tale reverberates with Iraqi citizens, who desperately want improved security from their first elected government, but also demand new accountability from police.
The case opens a rare window on the workings of the Iraqi government, whose conflicting impulses teeter between increasing transparency and clinging to Hussein-era impunity.
Majbal Adnan Latif al-Alawi, 39, his brother Ali Adnan Latif al-Alawi, 35, and their friend, Aidi Mahaissen Lefteh, 30, returned from exile in Iran after the US invasion two years ago.
Like many men in their families, they carried Badr identification cards, a badge that inspires respect in some Iraqis and fear in others. Sunnis, especially, recall that the Badr Brigades took Iran's side in its war with Iraq. Now the group calls itself the Badr Organization and says it is now a civilian group acting only within Iraqi law.
The three victims, their families say, had office jobs with Badr and hoped it would find them government jobs.
On Feb. 12, they were arrested in Zafaraniya, in eastern Baghdad. Abd Ali al-Alawi, the brothers' uncle, said they drove there to rent an apartment and mistakenly ran a police checkpoint, where they were detained after showing their Badr cards.
Kadhim, the Interior Ministry spokesman, told a different story, saying the men stumbled into a firefight in which Sunni insurgents had killed several police. The police thought the three opened fire on them, Kadhim said, but he now thinks the Badr members joined the fight on the side of police.
The uncle, Alawi, said he went two consecutive days to the police station where the men were being held, but was not allowed to see them or the officer in charge, Brigadier Amer Sajid al-Dami. On the third day, he said, a police major agreed to check on the case.
''When he came back out, he was trembling," recalled Alawi, whose big toe bears a scar he said was inflicted when Hussein's torturers pulled out the nail a decade ago.
''He told us, 'Please don't make me interfere with this case. I am afraid for my family.' "
By then, the three men were already dead. First Lieutenant Haider Abdul-Wahab, who works in another police station, said in an interview that he found the men's blindfolded corpses, one in handcuffs, dumped by a roadside on Feb. 13, the day after their arrest.
They were taken to Baghdad's central morgue. Autopsy reports viewed by the Globe state that all three had bruises on their faces, arms, backs, and legs, apparently from being struck with a stick or long object.
Each died from blunt-force injuries and bleeding, the reports say. Majbal's left big toenail had been pulled out. The Interior Ministry immediately launched an investigation, Kadhim said.
But when Alawi learned his nephews and their friend were dead -- leaving 15 children fatherless -- he feared there would be no justice without political muscle. He went to the main office of the Shi'ite bloc. Angry and agitated, he threatened to take revenge -- tribal codes permit tit-for-tat killings -- if he did not get help.
The party made the case a cause celebre, distributing posters that displayed the bodies. Al Furat broadcast a video taken at the morgue, on which a narrator points out blackened, scarred areas on the bodies that he says are the result of electric shocks.
Within a week, Prime Minister Allawi issued a statement that denounced the killings as ''a barbaric and criminal act by elements who exceeded the limits of their responsibility." He vowed to follow the case personally and called for ''maximum punishment."
The families now receive a stipend well above the pay of most government officials, but they say they only want justice. If the killers are not severely punished, ''we'll take revenge by tribal law," said Aidi's brother Farhan Mahaissen Lefteh, 37. ''That means we live in the jungle."
Anne Barnard can be reached at abarnard@globe.com.
