BAGHDAD, 1 June 2006 — Iraq’s new prime minister declared a one-month state of emergency in the city of Basra yesterday, vowing to strike with an “iron fist” against gangs and feuding Shiite factions threatening vital oil exports.
“We have ordered the army unit (in Basra) to deploy on the streets,” Nuri Al-Maliki told reporters in Iraq’s second city, which is in the grip of a fierce power struggle.
“We call this month the month of security in Basra,” he said, 11 days after taking office. “We hope after this month that we will come back to Basra and see that the situation has improved a lot.” Iraqi forces will patrol Basra day and night, search for weapons and set up checkpoints, a government source said.
Maliki also announced the formation of a four-person security committee to deal with the situation in Basra during the state of emergency. Maliki, who was heading a high-level government delegation to Basra to restore stability, earlier vowed to crack down on groups threatening security and oil exports.
In violence yesterday nine people were killed and 17 wounded in a mortar attack in the southern outskirts of Baghdad as police said they had found 42 bodies over the past 24 hours in different parts of the capital — bound, tortured and shot.
Also in Baghdad, gunmen killed Ali Jaafar, sports anchorman for Iraqi state television, as he left his home, police said.
Meanwhile, a joint Iraqi-US security body said yesterday US forces had killed “by mistake” two women who were en route to a maternity hospital north of Baghdad. News of the deaths came a day after Iraq’s prime minister told Reuters his patience was wearing thin with “excuses” from US troops that they kill civilians by “mistake”.
In another development, defense attorneys for former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein accused the prosecution yesterday of trying to buy a witness and putting someone on the stand who perjured himself.
Speaking from behind a curtain to hide his identity, a defense witness, who said he worked at a US base, accused chief prosecutor Jaafar Al-Mussawi of offering him money in 2004 to give false testimony. “One day they took me to a room where I met someone and he said: ‘What you are saying is not good for us or the Iraqi people. We want to have the tyrant Saddam executed’,” said the witness of Mussawi and others. The chief prosecutor in the Saddam trial was forced to defend himself in the court.
And for a second time since the trial opened in October 2005, the judge ordered Saddam’s half-brother, Barzan Al-Tikriti, out of the court after they argued over the judge’s ethnic origins.
“He gave me $500 and they threatened me if I ever told anyone about it,” the witness said of Mussawi, in testimony that prompted defense calls for the trial to be adjourned.
“They wanted me to give false testimony against Saddam Hussein in an American military base in March or April 2004,” added the anonymous witness who was 14 at the time of the assassination bid. The prosecutor struck back at his accusers, calling for the witness testimony of the past two days to be disallowed.
A US official close to the court later said defense witnesses who accused the chief prosecutor of using bribes were detained by the Iraqi High Tribunal.“
