Unidentified gunmen opened fire in a trading company in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood yesterday, killing eight employees and wounding six, police said.
The men, some in police uniform, arrived at the al-Ibtikar Trade Contracting Co in five black BMWs at about 8:15am, police Lieutenant Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said. Those killed included five men and three women, he said.
The motive of the attack in west Baghdad's Mansour district was not clear. The assailants burned part of the building and didn't appear to have taken any money, Abdul-Razzaq said.
PHOTO: AP
Those who survived the attack told police that the gunmen identified themselves as Iraqi Interior Ministry intelligence agents.
Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed by sectarian killers as well as death squads operating inside the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry since the Feb. 22 bombing of an important Shiite shrine set off a wave of revenge. Usually, the victims are killed secretively, their bodies discovered hours or days after the attack.
Another trading company in Mansour was targeted earlier this week by gunmen who abducted 16 employees. They wore military uniforms and masks and showed up in four civilian cars at the headquarters of the Saeed Import and Export Co Police said the kidnappers went through papers and computer files before leaving with their captives, al-Mohammedawi said.
In yesterday's attack, survivors said the gunmen first asked where the manager was, but he was not in the office. They then apparently gathered the victims together and shot each of them before fleeing, police said.
Meanwhile, senior Shiite politicians said on Tuesday that the US ambassador had told Shiite leaders to inform the Iraqi prime minister that the Bush administration did not want him to remain the leader of Iraq in the next government.
It is the first time the Americans have directly intervened in the furious debate over the country's top job, the politicians said, and it is inflaming tensions between the US and some Shiite leaders.
The ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the head of the main Shiite political bloc at a meeting last Saturday to pass a "personal message from President [George W.] Bush" on to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who the Shiites insist should stay in his post, said Redha Jowad Taki, a Shiite politician and member of parliament who was at the meeting.
Khalilzad said that Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" Jaafari to be the next prime minister, according to Taki, an aide to Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite bloc. It was the first "clear and direct message" from the Americans on the issue of the nominee for prime minister, Taki said. A spokeswoman for the US embassy declined to comment directly on what Khalilzad discussed in his meeting on Saturday, though she confirmed the ambassador did see Hakim.
A spokesman for Jaafari said the prime minister had heard of the message through officials in his party, and accused the Americans of trying to subvert Iraqi sovereignty and weaken the Shiite ranks.
"How can they do this?" said Haider al-Ubady, the spokesman. "An ambassador telling a sovereign country what to do is unacceptable."
"The perception is very strong among certain Shia parties that the US, led by Khalilzad, is trying to unseat Jaafari," he added.
Tensions between Shiite leaders and the US government, which had been rising for months, have reached a crisis point following an assault on Sunday night by US and Iraqi forces on a Shiite mosque in northern Baghdad. Shiite leaders say at least 17 civilians were killed in the battle, mostly political party members, while US commanders say those killed were insurgents.
The embassy spokeswoman, Elizabeth Colton, confirmed that Khalilzad and Hakim had met on Saturday, as they regularly do to discuss Iraq's precarious political situation.
"The decisions about the choice of the prime minister are entirely up to the Iraqis," she said. "This will be an Iraqi decision."
Any push by the US government against Jaafari's nomination would be another sign of the White House's acute impatience over the deadlocked talks to form a four-year government.
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
STILL IN POWER: US intelligence reports showed that the Iranian regime is not in danger of collapse and retains control of the public, casting doubt on Trump’s exit Nearly every US Senate Democrat on Wednesday signed a letter sent to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth requesting a “swift investigation” of airstrikes on a girls’ school in Iran that killed scores of children and any other potential US military actions causing civilian harm. Reuters reported on Thursday last week that US military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for the Feb. 28 strike on the school, as US and Israeli forces launched attacks on Iran. “The results of this school attack are horrific. The majority of those killed in the strikes were girls between the ages
RSS