The US military said on Tuesday that it had credible evidence linking Iranians and Iraqi militiamen, detained here in raids last week, to criminal activities, including attacks against US forces. Evidence also emerged that some of the detainees were involved in shipments of weapons to illegal armed groups in Iraq.
In its first official confirmation of last week's raids, the military said it had confiscated maps, videos, photographs and documents in one of the raids on a site in Baghdad. The military confirmed the arrests of five Iranians, and said that three of them had since been released.
The Bush administration has described the two Iranians still being held late on Tuesday night as senior military officials.
PHOTO: AP
Major General William Caldwell, the chief spokesman for the US command, said that the military, in the raid, had "gathered specific intelligence from highly credible sources that linked individuals and locations with criminal activities against Iraqi civilians, security forces and coalition force personnel."
Caldwell made his remarks by e-mail in response to a query about the raids, first reported on Monday in the New York Times.
"Some of that specific intelligence dealt explicitly with force-protection issues, including attacks on MNF-I [Multinational Force-Iraq] forces," he said via e-mail.
US officials have long said that the Iranian government interferes in Iraq, but the arrests, in the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of Iraq's most powerful Shiite political leaders, were the first in which officials were offering evidence of the link.
The raids threaten to upset the delicate balance of the three-way relationship between the US, Iran and Iraq. The Iraqi government has made extensive efforts to engage Iran in security matters in recent months and the arrests of the Iranians could scuttle those efforts.
The Iraqi government has kept silent on the arrests, but on Tuesday night officials spoke of intense behind-the-scenes negotiations by Iraq's government and its fractured political elite over how to handle the situation.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani had invited the two Iranians during his visit to Tehran, his spokesman said on Sunday, but by Tuesday, some Iraqi officials began to question if Talabani had in fact made the invitation.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
RSS