BAGHDAD, 21 June 2006 — Two US soldiers who went missing after an attack on their checkpoint were found dead on Monday night, and a senior Iraqi defense official said their bodies showed signs of “barbaric” torture. Al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed in a Web posting that its new leader personally beheaded them. The US military claimed killing 15 insurgents in a village near Baquba, but residents said they were workers of a poultry farm.
“Coalition forces have recovered what we believe are the remains of the soldiers,” US military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell told a news conference in Baghdad yesterday. He said the bodies would be returned to the United States for identification and autopsies to determine how they died.
Iraqi Defense Ministry official Maj. Gen. Abdul Aziz Mohammed told Reuters earlier that a joint US-Iraqi force found the bodies of Privates Thomas Lowell Tucker, 25, and Kristian Menchaca, 23, near an electricity plant in Yusufiya. He said the bodies showed signs of “barbaric torture.”
The two went missing at dusk on Friday after an ambush at a checkpoint in Yusufiya, a town in an area south of Baghdad some Iraqis call the “Triangle of Death,” which is an Al-Qaeda stronghold. Another soldier was killed in the attack.
“God Almighty has graced the leader Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir... with the implementation of the sentence,” said a statement from the Al-Qaeda-led Mujahedeen Shoura Council. It said the two had been killed by having their throats slit.
US forces hunting insurgents linked to Al-Qaeda in Iraq said they killed 15 gunmen in raids north of Baghdad yesterday. Residents of Qaduri Ali Al-Shahin village, 13 km north of Baquba, said the men were employees of a nearby poultry farm, not rebels. The Sunni Muslim Scholars Association, which is sharply critical of the US occupation, condemned what it called “this crime.”
A resident identifying himself as Mohammed Jabar Al-Qaduri said his sons Jassem and Mazen were among the dead and that all the victims had worked at a poultry farm close to the houses targeted in the raid.
The US military also claimed it killed the “right-hand man” of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, describing him as someone who could have succeeded the Jordanian-born militant. Iraqi Mansur Suleiman Al-Mashhadani was killed Friday by US forces in Yusufiya, said Caldwell.
