BAGHDAD - Seven inmates were killed yesterday when mortar shells slammed into an Iraqi Interior Ministry jail here, Iraqi security officials said. A few miles south, fire broke out at one of Iraq's main oil refineries, a possible case of sabotage.
There were conflicting reports about the cause of the blaze, but police said a rocket shell hit a gas tanker. More than 450 attacks have been carried out against Iraq's oil installations or industry employees since the US-led invasion in March 2003, according to analysts who monitor security issues related to energy. Attacks occurred Friday and Saturday in the northern oil hub of Baiji.
Police, meanwhile, announced the arrest of four suspects in the weekend assassination of a police chief in the southern Iraqi province of Babil.
The arrests came a day after Major General Qais al-Maamouri and two of his bodyguards were killed in Hillah, capital of the predominantly Shi'ite Muslim province, after a bomb hit his convoy. The suspects, police said, were found to have significant traces of explosives on their bodies.
In the northern city of Kirkuk yesterday, a colonel and two policemen were killed when gunmen opened fire on their convoy. In Baghdad, the manager of the Rashad hospital for mental and psychiatric diseases was gunned down while driving home.
The ongoing violence was the latest reminder of the dangers Iraqis continue to face, despite significant security improvements in recent months. On Human Rights Day yesterday, an annual international event, some Iraqis said they felt only slightly better off than when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq.
Key concerns include the treatment of detainees, growing violence against women, and the fear of speaking one's mind on political issues for fear of sectarian retaliation - concerns that many here say contradict the goal of the invasion to bring Iraqis greater freedoms.
"Before 2003 there were [human-rights] violations, but not like the violations we are seeing today," said Omar Jaboori, human-rights adviser to Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, who has been an outspoken critic of the treatment of detainees since the start of the war.
Jaboori said about 32,000 people were being held by Iraqi security forces. The number being held by US-led coalition forces is 25,500, according to the US military.
US military officials say they have gone to great lengths to eliminate abuses at their detention facilities in Iraq. Jaboori said Hashimi had proposed to the Iraqi government that most detainees be granted a pardon.
Said Arikat, a Baghdad-based spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, said in a written response to questions that "marked improvements" had been made in the past three or four months on the status of detainees in Iraqi prisons, "resulting from efforts by the judicial authorities to streamline and speed up the review of detainees' cases."
However, he noted that overall, "the current human-rights situation in Iraq remains of serious concern" to his agency.
