At least seven policemen died and hundreds of others fell ill after suffering food poisoning on Sunday evening in the town of Numaniya, south of Baghdad, police sources at the base said on Monday.
It was not clear if the poisoning at an Iraqi military base was deliberate but police sources said they arrested four cooks yesterday suspected of tampering with the food.
But the spokesman for the commander of the Iraqi armed forces said no one had died.
"Three hundred and fifty to 400 people were poisoned, they were given medical treatment instantly and four were taken to a nearby hospital and everyone has returned to normal," spokesman Brigadier Qasim al-Musawi told a news conference.
But Lieutenant-Colonel Hasan Nima at the base said the policemen, from the Interior Ministry's 4th division, became ill only minutes after the meal and insisted at least 1,350 of the 2,000 policemen at the base were hospitalized.
The policemen, nearly all Shiite Muslims from southern Iraq, blamed several people, most notably a Sunni contractor, providing food for the military base where the police were "re-training."
But Qasim and other Shiites did not say they believed the poisoning had sectarian motives.
Meanwhile,. in a daring move, gunmen overran an Iraqi military checkpoint in east Baghdad early yesterday and kidnapped 11 soldiers, police said.
The gunmen arrived at the Sadr City checkpoint in a minivan and a car, police spokesman Lieutenant Thaer Mahmoud said. They seized all the soldiers on duty and made off.
It was not clear who kidnapped the soldiers, but Sadr City is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
In other news the brother of Iraq's Sunni Arab vice president was slain early yesterday in his Baghdad home -- the third member of the family to be murdered in the last year, a government spokesman said.
General Amir al-Hashimi, brother of Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi and an adviser in the Defense Ministry, was killed by unidentified gunmen wearing military uniforms in his home in north Baghdad, Brigadier Qassim al-Moussawi said.
Hashimi's sister and another brother also have been murdered in the last year.
Elsewhere, a suicide car bomber slammed into an Iraqi police checkpoint in Tal Afar, 420km northwest of Baghdad, killing one policeman and wounding 12, police Brigadier Najim Abdullah said.
Meanwhile, a Kurdish woman accused former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein of bulldozing her family into a mass grave yesterday as the ousted Iraqi leader returned to court for the latest hearing in his genocide trial.
The case continued following a two-week adjournment, despite a boycott by Saddam's defense lawyers, and heard more grim prosecution testimony.
The former strongman and six of his top officials are accused of ordering the 1988 Anfal campaign by Iraqi forces in which, prosecutors say, 182,000 Kurds were killed.
The woman told of how Iraqi forces attacked her village in northern Iraq region in April 1988 when she was 13 years old and rounded up members of her family, including her brother and his wife and children.
"I know what happened to my family. They were buried alive," she told the court. The prosecutor said that her relatives' identity cards had been found at a mass grave near Hadhar, in northern Iraq.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
The death toll from a shooting in western Afghanistan rose to 11 on Saturday, after gunmen targeted civilians at a picnic spot in Herat, the provincial authority said. Bullet marks were visible on a wall of the Sayed Mohammad Agha Shia shrine, while bloodstains marked a blanket abandoned at the scene. “Eleven people have been recorded dead and eight others wounded from Friday’s incident, with the condition of two of the wounded reported as critical,” Herat’s information office said in a statement. The update raises a toll of seven killed provided on Friday by the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs
RSS