Iraq: Up to 60 die as police go on killing spree

Shiite militants and police enraged by massive truck bombings in the northwestern town of Tal Afar today went on a revenge spree against Sunni residents there, killing as many as 60 people, officials said.

The gunmen began roaming Sunni neighbourhoods in the city yesterday and continued until today, shooting at residents and homes, according to police and a Sunni official.

Witnesses said relatives of the Shiite victims in the truck bombings broke into the Sunni homes and either killed the men or dragged them outside and shot them in the streets.

Ali al-Talafari, a Sunni member of the local Turkomen Front Party, said the Iraqi army had arrested 18 policemen accused of being involved after they were identified by the Sunni families targeted. But he said the attackers included Shiite militiamen.

He said more than 60 Sunnis had been killed, but a senior hospital official in Tal Afar put the death toll at 45, with four wounded.

The hospital official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns, said the victims were men aged between 15 and 60 and were killed with a shot to the back of the head.

Police said earlier dozens of Sunnis were killed or wounded, but they had no precise figures, and communications problems made it difficult to reach them for an update. The shooting continued for more than two hours, the officials said.

Army troops later moved into the Sunni areas to stop the violence and a curfew was slapped on the entire town, according to Wathiq al-Hamdani, the provincial police chief and his head of operations, Brig. Abdul-Karim al-Jibouri.

“The situation is under control now,” said al-Hamdani. “The local Tal Afar police have been confined to their bases and policemen from Mosul are moving there to replace them.”

The violence came a day after two truck bombs shattered markets in the city, killing at least 63 people and wounding dozens in the second assault in four days. After yesterday’s bombings, suspected Sunni insurgents tried to ambush ambulances carrying the injured out of the northwestern city but were driven off by police gunfire, Iraqi authorities said.

Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad, is in the province of Ninevah of which Mosul is the capital. It is a mainly Turkomen city with some 60% of its residents adhering to Shiite Islam and the rest mostly Sunnis.

The death toll in the bombings, as well as the shooting deaths today, was among the worst bloodshed in a surge of violence across Iraq as militants on both sides of the sectarian divide apparently fled to other parts of the country to avoid a US-Iraqi security crackdown, raising tensions outside the capital.

Suicide bombers also detonated explosives on trucks carrying highly toxic chlorine in Fallujah today, wounding about 15 US and Iraqi security forces, although the attackers were blocked from reaching government buildings, the American military said.

The chlorine gas attack was the eighth launched since January 28, when a suicide bomber driving a dump truck filled with explosives and a chlorine tank struck a quick-reaction force and Iraqi police in Ramadi, killing 16 people.

A parked car bomb also struck a market in the predominantly Shiite city of Mahaweel, 35 miles south of Baghdad, killing at least four people and wounding 16.