The US military said on Wednesday that two women used as suicide bombers in attacks earlier this month had undergone psychiatric treatment but there is no indication they had Down syndrome as officials initially had claimed.
Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, a military spokesman, said the women used in the Feb. 1 pet market bombings had been identified as residents from the northeastern outskirts of Baghdad who were in their late 20s or early 30s.
The two attacks killed nearly 100 people, and Iraqi and US officials said at the time the women appeared to be unwitting attackers.
Lieutenant General Abboud Qanbar, the chief Iraqi military commander in Baghdad, said soon after the attacks that photos of the women's heads showed they had Down syndrome, but he did not offer any other proof.
A US military spokesman for the Baghdad area, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Stover, also said at the time that medical experts with his division had examined the photos and agreed the women probably suffered from the genetic disorder.
"They were both females and they both looked like they had Down syndrome," Stover said on Feb. 2.
A cell phone image of one of the heads was inconclusive.
There was speculation that the heads could have been distorted by the blast, leading police initially to believe they had Down syndrome.
On Wednesday, Smith backed away from the claim about Down syndrome while responding to a question concerning the psychiatric histories of the two bombers.
"Both had recently received psychiatric treatment for depression and/or schizophrenia. From what we know now there's no indication that they had Down syndrome," Smith said, citing records obtained by the military.
Smith did not address other details of the bombings. Iraqi officials have said the explosives were detonated by remote-control, presumably because people with Down syndrome could not be relied upon to set off the bombs.
The US military and the Iraqi government have claimed that Sunni insurgents led by al-Qaeda in Iraq are increasingly trying to use Iraq's most vulnerable populations as suicide bombers to avoid raising suspicions or being searched at checkpoints that guard access to many markets, neighborhoods and bridges in the capital.
The pet market attacks led Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to call al-Qaeda in Iraq "the most brutal and bankrupt of movements."
On Tuesday, the Iraqi Interior Ministry ordered police to begin rounding up beggars, homeless and mentally disabled people from the streets of Baghdad and other cities to prevent insurgents from using them as bombers.
The people detained in the Baghdad sweep will be handed over to social welfare institutions and psychiatric hospitals that can provide shelter and care for them, according to the ministry.
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