Looters run riot as troops stand back

TAKING the law into their own hands, Baghdad residents blockaded streets and beat up looters yesterday as the US said the military does not intend to act as a police force.

Thousands of Iraqis, including entire families, plundered and burned government ministries and other symbols of Saddam Hussein’s regime in a third straight day of lawlessness that began with the arrival of US troops in Baghdad.

The ministries of education and industry, both in the heart of Baghdad, were looted and set on fire, sending dark smoke over the city.

The foreign and information ministries and the Ba’ath Party headquarters were ransacked along with the city’s engineering and nursing colleges.

The trade ministry was also smouldering, along with one of the main markets in the city centre, and mobs looted Iraq’s largest archeological museum.

In Baghdad’s Karadah neighbourhood, residents fought back. They were armed with Kalashnikovs, set up roadblocks and checked passing cars for stolen goods.

Any plunder was confiscated and people in the cars were taken out and beaten.

The garage that housed Saddam Hussein’s car collection in the Republic Palace compound in central Baghdad has not escaped the attention of the city’s looters, according to reporters who entered the premises yesterday.

The remains of the deposed Iraqi president’s hobby could be seen in a large alleyway In the back of the garage was a London cab.

The German embassy and the French cultural centre, both in east Baghdad, were ransacked by looters.

At the French cultural centre, where looters burst water pipes and flooded the ground floor, books were left floating in the reading rooms and corridors, and a photograph of Jacques Chirac, the French president, was smashed.

“Is this your liberation?” screamed one shopkeeper at a US tank crew as youths took everything in his small hardware shop.

A leading Shi’ite Muslim cleric in Lebanon yesterday called on Iraqis to stop looting.

“I urge you to maintain security and preserve the country’s riches. I urge you to maintain security and preserve the country’s riches."

British forces shot and killed five men trying to rob a bank who opened fire on them in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, the scene of looting over the past week, a US military spokesman said yesterday.

Brig Gen Vincent Brooks, Central Command spokesman, said the military is helping to rebuild the civil administration but expects the Iraqis themselves to assume responsibility for law and order.

US Defence Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld characterised widespread looting in Iraq as a period of “untidiness” and suggested it was only a transitional phase on the way to freedom from Saddam’s rule.