BAGHDAD: A member of an Iraqi militant group admitted to the 2006 rape and murder of an Iraqi journalist in a video confession aired Tuesday.
Yasser Al-Takhi, from the Jaish Mohammed group behind the 2003 truck bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq, and his two brothers were shown confessing after being arrested for the kidnap and murder of Al-Arabiya television presenter Atwar Bahjat and two of her colleagues.
Bahjat, her cameraman Adnan Abdallah and sound engineer Khaled Mohsen were snatched in the northern Iraqi town of Samara on Feb. 22, 2006, where they had been reporting on the bombing of a Shiite mosque that plunged the country to the brink of civil war.
Their bodies were found a day later, with Bahjat having suffered bullet wounds to the head, neck and chest.
Al-Takhi, 25, told interrogators that he and three others, including his brothers Mahmoud and Ghazwan, kidnapped the news team and drove them to a side street where he raped and shot Bahjat, while his two brothers killed Abdallah and Mohsen with a machine gun.
Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, spokesman for the Iraqi Army’s Baghdad operations, said the Takhi brothers were arrested in the capital’s southern neighborhood of Dora but did not say when.
Atta told reporters that Yasser Al-Takhi admitted being in Jaish Mohammed, whose August 2003 attack on the UN offices killed the head of the UN mission in Baghdad Sergio De Mello and 21 others.
Al-Takhi also said the kidnap gang, which included driver Noman Hussein, was directed by a man named Gaith Al-Abbassi.
Al-Takhi said in his confession that he had been arrested twice before by US forces in Iraq, once in October 2003 and again at the end of 2006, but was released both times because “the Americans only investigated him for attacks against them,” Atta said.
The US military meanwhile said the deputy commander of a group linked to Al-Qaeda has been arrested in northern Iraq. The group, Ansar Al-Islam, is believed by the military to be behind attacks on US and Iraqi troops in Mosul, considered the last urban stronghold of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and elsewhere in the country. Fakri Hadi Gari, also known as Abu Abbas and Mullah Halgurd, and nine other suspected members were arrested July 24 during a joint US-Iraqi operation, the US military said.
Described as a key operative, Gari is accused of organizing attacks as well as recruiting and financing operations, the military said. He also is accused of coordinating the movement of insurgents across the borders of Iraq.
Spanish authorities have said a cell connected to a group also named Ansar Al-Islam, was behind the March 11, 2004, Madrid bombings that killed 191 people and wounded around 1,800. It is not clear that the two groups are the same, however.
Among those arrested in Mosul was a man described as a “financial emir” as well as driver for other key leaders of Ansar Al-Islam, the statement said, which added that the arrests came following investigations by Iraqi Army and police.
