An al-Qaeda-linked insurgent shot and killed his own father as he slept in his bed for refusing to quit his job as an Iraqi interpreter for the US military, police said, a rare deadly attack on a close family member over allegations of collaborating with the enemy.
The attack happened on a particularly bloody day in Iraq, with at least 27 people killed nationwide in bombings and ambushes on Friday that largely targeted houses of government officials, Iraqi security forces and those seen as allied with them.
Hameed al-Daraji, 50, worked as a contractor and translator for the US military for seven years since shortly after the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.
He was shot in the chest about 3am, while sleeping in his house in Samarra, a former insurgent stronghold 95km north of Baghdad, police Lieutenant Emad Muhsin said.
Authorities arrested the son and his cousin, saying the young men apparently were trying to prove their loyalty after rejoining the insurgency. Police were also looking for another son who allegedly took part in the attack.
Citing confessions, police said the son whom they arrested, Abdul-Halim Hameed, 30, was a former member of al-Qaeda in Iraq who quit the terror network in the middle of 2007 under pressure from US-Iraqi security operations that have led to a sharp drop in violence in the area.
Colonel Hazim Ali, a senior security official in Samarra, said Hameed, his 19-year-old cousin and 24-year-old brother remained committed to extremist causes.
With US troops withdrawing from the country, Ansar al-Sunnah, an insurgent group with ties to al-Qaeda, recently lured the men into their ranks with offers of hard cash, Ali said.
The US military said it was looking into the report.
The Samarra assault brought into focus the fears of Iraqis who have worked with the Americans and are worried they will face renewed violence as their employers prepare to leave the country by the end of next year.
Already, many have been targeted by extremist groups who view them as traitors. Nonetheless, Iraqis could not think of another case in which a family member killed an immediate relative because of his or her employment with the Americans in this country.
In other violence on Friday, gunmen ambushed a checkpoint near the Anbar Province town of Qaim, a former insurgent stronghold near the Syrian border, killing seven Iraqi soldiers, according to police, hospital and provincial officials.
They said the gunmen shot an eighth soldier several times but left him alive “to convey a message to the Iraqi army.”
Meanwhile, car bombs targeting a police captain and a provincial council member tore through two restive cities north of Baghdad.
One blew up in the city of Tuz Khormato about 50m from the house of Niazi Mohammed, an ethnic Turkoman member of the Salahuddin provincial council, police said.
City police chief Colonel Hussein Ali blamed al-Qaeda for the attack, which killed at least eight people and wounded 69. A second car bomb was discovered about 100m from the blast site, but it did not explode, Ali said.
Another blast targeted the house of police Captain Mustafa Mohammed in the city of Baqouba, killing two neighbors and wounding 27 other people, including some of the officer’s relatives, police said.
Hours later in the Sunni district of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, a bomb exploded at the gate of a house, killing a man and two women who sold tea and water to soldiers at a nearby Iraqi army checkpoint, according to police and hospital officials.
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