Baghdad death squad kills eight workers, wounds six

GUNMEN lined up 14 employees working at an electronics trading company in Baghdad yesterday and shot them all, killing eight and wounding six, police said.

The motive of the attack at the al-Ibtikar trading company in the upscale Mansour neighbourhood was not immediately clear. According to survivors’ accounts to police, the assailants first asked for the company’s manager, who was not there, before firing on the employees.

The survivors said the assailants, some of whom were wearing police uniforms, identified themselves as intelligence agents from the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed in sectarian violence and by death squads operating inside the Shi’ite-dominated Interior Ministry since the February 22 bombing of an important Shi’ite shrine in Samarra set off a wave of revenge attacks. Usually, the victims are killed secretively, their bodies discovered hours or days later.

The assault yesterday was the second to target a trading company in Mansour this week. On Monday, gunmen wearing military uniforms and masks kidnapped 16 employees from the headquarters of the Saeed Import and Export Company. Police said the assailants went through papers and computer files before leaving with their captives.

Another wave of kidnapping took place on Tuesday, when masked gunmen, many in military uniform, stormed into a currency exchange and two electronic stores in broad daylight, kidnapping 24 Iraqis and making off with tens of thousands of dollars. The abductions occurred within a 30-minute period, and police were investigating whether they were linked.

Elsewhere, gunmen killed three staffers of radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in a drive-by shooting in west Baghdad. A mortar round slammed to earth just outside Mr al-Sadr’s home in the holy city of Najaf this week.