Fierce fighting in Karbala leaves 8 civilians dead
KARBALA, Iraq, May 21: An Iraqi working for Al-Jazeera television and eight other civilians were killed in ferocious fighting between US troops and Shia militiamen in the holy city of Karbala, medics said on Friday.
Hamid Rashid Wali of the Arab satellite news channel was killed by sniper fire at 1:30 am (2130 GMT Thursday), said Doctor Ali Aradawi, head of the casualty department at the city's hospital.
The Al-Jazeera producer in Baghdad, Saad Ibrahim, said that "at around 12:30 am, we had just finished transmitting on the roof of the hotel when shots were fired at us and Rashid Hamid Wali was shot in the head.
"He was working for us for a long time and had come to Karbala two days ago to replace the previous team," he added. Wali, an assistant, was on the roof at the time with a cameraman and a journalist.
Aradawi said eight other civilians were also killed and 10 wounded during the violence that rocked the city near the shrines of Imam Hussein (AS) and Hazrat Abbas (AS), two of the most sacred Shia sites in Iraq.
US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of military operations, said later that US warplanes fired on militiamen in two separate incidents early Friday in a number of engagements near the Mokhayam mosque.
The unrest resulted in a "number of enemy casualties," he said. Coalition troops also killed the driver of a BMW and wounded one passenger as the car sped towards a checkpoint and its passengers opened fire between Karbala and the neighbouring city of Kufa, Kimmitt added.
Just days before Wali's death, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said Iraqi journalists "frequently endure harassment, threats, or attacks at the hands of both coalition forces and Iraqi insurgents".
US SOLDIER FOUND GUILTY: A US soldier who failed to return to his unit in Iraq after taking a two-week leave to the United States last year was found guilty of desertion, a military court said on Friday.
Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, a member of the Florida National Guard, faces up to a year in prison, a bad conduct discharge and a demotion in rank. Mejia, a nine-year US Army veteran, was deployed to Iraq early last year and took a two-week leave to the United States in October.
He was gone for five months before surrendering to Army officials in March. He has filed an application for conscientious objector status. During his court martial, Mejia cited his opposition to the Iraq war and said he had sought to be discharged from the Army under a US military regulation that prohibits non-citizens from serving more than eight years.
Mejia, 28, has dual Nicaraguan and Costa Rican nationality. The soldier testified he "had problems in Iraq" and decided to seek status as a conscientious objector.
Tod Ensign, director of Citizen Soldier, a New York-based nonprofit group that sponsored Mejia's defence, said Mejia chose not to go back to Iraq after seeing the torture of prisoners and other immoral acts.
The issue of prisoner abuse has rocked the US military in light of recent revelations of abuse of Iraqi detainees. Earlier this week, a US soldier in Iraq was sentenced to a year in jail after pleading guilty to abusing Iraqis in a scandal that has sparked worldwide outrage and battered the image of the United States.
CHALABI RAID: In a related development, members of Iraq's Governing Council condemned a raid on the house and offices of Washington's former top Iraq ally Ahmad Chalabi and said on Friday it was orchestrated by the US-led administration.
Three officials who attended a meeting of the US-appointed Governing Council told Reuters its members held the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) responsible for Thursday's raid.
The council would demand an explanation from the CPA, two of the officials said. "Everybody agreed that the CPA was behind it," said one. The CPA has said the raid was ordered by an Iraqi judge and that US forces were present only as backup.
The raids, in which soldiers and police sealed off the neighbourhood where Chalabi lives, escalated a confrontation between the US-led occupation authority and the man whose Pentagon connections once hinted at a top role in Iraq.
The raid came two days after US officials announced the Pentagon had cut off funding of $340,000 monthly for the party of Chalabi, who has clashed with US officials over future control of Iraq's oil revenues and a fraud probe of the UN oil-for-food programme.
SHIA LEADER'S OFFICE RAIDED: US and Iraqi forces stormed offices of Shia religious leader Moqtada al-Sadr in the northern city of Kirkuk and detained 15 people suspected of a bomb attack there, the US military said on Friday. -AFP/Reuters
