Dozens killed as Iraq PM talks peace: Moscow confirms deaths
BAGHDAD, June 26: Ten Sunni students were kidnapped in Baghdad and at least 32 people killed across Iraq on Monday one day after Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki unveiled a peace plan aimed at easing the violence.
Moscow meanwhile confirmed the killing of four of its Baghdad embassy employees following an internet statement by their kidnappers, an Al Qaeda-led insurgent grouping, that they had been executed.
In the fourth incident of mass abductions this month, the students were kidnapped by gunmen who arrived in five sports utility vehicles with tinted windows and stormed into a hostel on Oqba bin Nafaa square in the capital’s Karradah district, security officials said.
One official said they were singled out because they were Sunnis.
The broad daylight abduction occurred despite the fact that Karradah, like many of the capital’s principal districts, is filled with checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers as part of a massive operation launched on June 14 involving more than 50,000 troops.
On Sunday, 16 Iraqis, most of them working at a scientific research centre, were kidnapped by gunmen in Taji, north of Baghdad, where more than 60 employees at a factory owned by the industry ministry were similarly kidnapped by masked gunmen on Wednesday.
And 50 people working for long-distance bus travel companies were kidnapped in Baghdad on June 5.
Guerillas also left a trail of blood across Iraq as 32 people were killed in a series of attacks.
Five Iraqi army soldiers were killed when a car bomb exploded beside their patrol in Baghdad’s western Ameriyah neighbourhood, the interior ministry official said.
In the southern Saydiyah neighbourhood, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a police commando checkpoint, killing three commandos.
Also in the capital, gunmen attacked the convoy of senior Sunni MP Adnan Al-Dulaimi, killing his bodyguard.
Elsewhere in Iraq 23 others were killed in a series of shootings.
The latest wave of violence came a day after the Al Qaeda-led Mujahideen Shura Council in Iraq said it killed four Russian hostages because Moscow had failed to meet its demand to withdraw from Chechnya and free Muslim prisoners.
A video released by the group showed four hostages speaking in separate messages dated June 13, before two of them were shown being killed and another after his murder. There was no sign of the fourth.
Fyodor Zaytsev, Rinat Aglyulin, Anatoly Smirnov and Oleg Fedosseyev were abducted on June 3 when gunmen ambushed their vehicle in the upscale west Baghdad district of Mansur.
A fifth diplomat, Vitaly Titov, was killed.
The latest video was a chilling reminder of the deadly campaign of hostage-takings and beheadings unleashed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed in a US air strike on June 7.
The violence came despite Maliki’s unveiling of a national reconciliation plan in a bid to curb the resistance and an upsurge of sectarian violence.
Under the plan, amnesty would be granted only to suspected guerillas in US or Iraqi custody who had committed no crimes.
“To those who want to reconcile, we extend our hand with an olive branch to build our nation,” Maliki told lawmakers on Sunday.—AFP
BAGHDAD, June 26: Ten Sunni students were kidnapped in Baghdad and at least 32 people killed across Iraq on Monday one day after Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki unveiled a peace plan aimed at easing the violence.
