Slaying of US writer in Basra is investigated
Had criticized police, warned about radicals
BAGHDAD -- American author and freelance journalist Steven Vincent, who was kidnapped and murdered late Tuesday in Basra, was an outspoken critic of the police force in the southern city and of the rise in what he called ''Islamo-fascism."
British soldiers discovered the body of Vincent, 49, early yesterday. He had been shot several times. His Iraqi translator, Nour Al Khal, 31, was in critical condition with bullet wounds in her chest.
Vincent, who lived in New York City, had spent more than two months in Basra working on a book about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the port city of 2 million.
In an op-ed article published in Sunday's edition of The New York Times, Vincent wrote that the British troops responsible for security in Basra were standing by as Islamic parties infiltrated the police force.
''A few police officers are perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations -- mostly of former Ba'ath Party members -- that take place in Basra each month," he wrote, citing an anonymous police source.
The source ''told me that there is even a sort of 'death car': a white
His death appeared to mark the first targeted killing of a Western journalist in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003. Since then, three other American journalists have died in Iraq, including veteran Boston Globe reporter Elizabeth Neuffer, who was killed in a car accident. Police spokesman Abdulkerim Zaidi and witnesses said that a group of men in an unmarked pickup truck abducted Vincent and Khal after 6 p.m. Tuesday when they were leaving a money changer's office near the Merbid Hotel, where Vincent had been staying.
The witnesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said four men carried out the kidnapping. Vincent resisted, and one of his shoes remained in the street after the pair were thrown in the truck and taken away.
The abductors fired several shots in the air during the struggle but no one came to the aid of the victims, even though an official police checkpoint was 60 feet away on the heavily trafficked Istiklal Street.
A British patrol found Khal and Vincent, a red scarf tied around his neck, shortly after midnight.
Khal had been Vincent's long-term translator during his reporting in Basra; he dedicated a chapter to her in a recently published book ''In the Red Zone: A Journey Into the Soul of Iraq," an account of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Since his return to the city this May, he had told other journalists he had eaten outside the Merbid Hotel only once, because he considered it a risk to Khal to be seen dining with a foreign man.
Unlike most journalists working in Iraq, Vincent traveled without security, often taking taxis. In public places he wouldn't speak English, pretending to be a deaf-mute. He and Khal would gesture to each other in made-up sign-language.
He was worried that his reporting would anger Basra's clerical and law enforcement establishment. Less than week ago, he said he was saving some of his most revealing reporting for the book he planned to write, fearful that if it were published while he was still in Basra it could endanger Khal or himself.
Vincent was openly scornful of Basra's police and government; he had written about the high rate of unsolved murders, public corruption, and death squads that targeted secular Iraqis in articles for the Christian Science Monitor, National Review, Harper's, and for his Internet blog, also called ''In the Red Zone." The blog entries took the form of letters to his wife, Lisa, in New York City.
A vocal supporter of the US-led invasion of Iraq, Vincent said he was angry at American and British officials for not getting more involved in building a democratic society in occupied Iraq.
''Sometimes American values are just better," he wrote in a typical blog posting that described corrupt Iraqi officials and a ''naïve American" Air Force officer in Basra who unwittingly might have been steering contracts their way.
A former art critic, Vincent turned his attention to terrorism and the Muslim world after the Sept. 11 attacks. He first visited Iraq in 2003.
He told a fellow journalist on Saturday that he planned to wrap up his research and return home with a few weeks.
A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, ''Western officials representing several agencies are directly involved in the investigation of this crime."
Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, wrote in an article on the publication's website yesterday: ''Vincent was a brave man who wanted to tell the truth, despite the deadly risks."
According to the watchdog Committee to Protect Journalists, 51 other journalists have been killed while working in Iraq since March 2003, about two-thirds of them Iraqi.
