GENEVA/BAGHDAD, 22 April 2006 — Iraqi authorities are illegally detaining thousands of people, the United Nations’ senior human rights official for the country said yesterday, and also urged the US-led coalition to charge or release its prisoners. Gianni Magazzeni, who is based in Baghdad, told reporters a total of 29,565 people were being detained in Iraq, some 14,222 of them by coalition forces.
Of the 15,000 people held by the local Iraqi authorities, only 8,300 were being held by the Justice Ministry, which is the only body that has the right to detain suspects for more than 72 hours, Magazzeni said. He said another 6,000 held by the Interior Ministry and some 460 held by the Defense Ministry were therefore “not even being detained in accordance with Iraqi law.”
Magazzeni added that the United Nations believed the number of suspects being detained by coalition forces was far too high. “We think that the 15,000 being held for ‘urgent security reasons’ are far too many and we are working very closely (with the coalition) to reduce that number considerably,” the UN envoy said. He said the United Nations still does not have access to prisoners being held in unidentified coalition prisons, and called for them to be released or handed over to Iraqi authorities to be charged.
“Torture and summary executions happen every day,” he said. Magazenni said so-called death squads had become more active since the bombing of the revered Shiite shrine at Samarra, and there were indications that the police and other authorities were involved.
At least seven people were killed in violence across Iraq yesterday, including five police commandos who were shot dead by gunmen near the northern city of Tikrit, police said. The five police commandos, dressed in civilian clothes, were ambushed and shot dead by gunmen who opened fire on their car, police said. The driver of the car was wounded.
A baker in Baghdad and a policeman in Baquba were also shot and killed in separate incidents, defense and interior ministry officials said. Nebil Ashur, a Shiite baker, was gunned down in the majority Sunni neighborhood of Al-Dura in southern Baghdad. In Baquba, some 60 kilometers northeast of the capital, the policeman was shot dead as he was on his way home.
Twenty suspected militants were also arrested in Baquba, where violence has flared in recent weeks, on suspicion of planting bombs directed at police and US troops. In another incident, 11 policemen were wounded in two roadside bomb blasts. Three were hurt in a first one in the Al-Qadisiya district of western Baghdad, and the other eight in an explosion as they arrived to investigate. Also in Baghdad, two corpses with their hands tied and bearing signs of torture were discovered in separate areas of the city.
In another development, Jordan said yesterday it has postponed a conference of Muslim religious leaders to try to heal sectarian divisions among Iraq’s main Sunni and Shiite sects that has pushed the country to the brink of civil war. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani had phoned King Abdallah on Thursday asking for the delay in the Arab League-sponsored conference planned for today in the presence of some of the Muslim world’s most prominent clerics and many of Iraq’s religious and tribal leaders.
“The Iraqi request to delay the Iraqi-Islamic Reconciliation Summit at the last minute was due to the preoccupation of a number of leading Iraqi figures with the consultations over the next government and their inability to attend the conference,” Abdul Salam Al-Abbadi, the conference chairman, said.
