BAGHDAD - When twin blasts ravaged crowded pet markets earlier this month, Iraqi authorities offered a chilling account: Mentally disabled women carried the hidden explosives perhaps as unwitting bombers for Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Yesterday, the US military brought another stunning twist to the plot - the acting director of a psychiatric hospital could have betrayed his ethics and turned over patient details to insurgents blamed for the attack, which killed nearly 100 people.
The questioning of the hospital administrator fits into a wider campaign to confront insurgents' changing tactics, such as using women as suicide bombers, as they seek to bypass stepped-up security measures and rebound from losses in US-led offensives.
But the joint US-Iraqi raids Sunday on the al-Rashad hospital seek to dig deeper into just one deadly day - the Feb. 1 bombings and whether a physician entrusted to care for the mentally disabled could have aided Al Qaeda.
Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, a military spokesman, said the hospital official was detained "in connection with the possible exploitation of mentally impaired women to Al Qaeda."
It was not immediately clear what direct contact occurred between the detained hospital administrator and the two women who carried the explosives into the crowded outdoor pet markets.
A spokesman for US troops in Baghdad, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Stover, said the official was suspected of providing names and files of patients at the hospital to insurgents, suggesting the probe could be broader than the attacks earlier this month. He said the hospital director's computer and files were seized in the raid.
The hospital is located in a mostly Shi'ite district, and Sunnis dominate the insurgents inspired by Al Qaeda.
The military did not identify the suspect, saying he was still under questioning. But a hospital official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information, said the detainee was Dr. Sahi Aboob al-Maliki, who had been on the job for two months after his predecessor was assassinated.
The Iraqi assertion that mentally disabled women were used in the attacks was initially met with skepticism. Iraqi authorities said they based the conclusion on photos of the bombers' heads that purportedly showed the women had Down syndrome, and have not offered any other proof.
