December 28, 2008	Sunday	Zilhaj 29, 1429

RAMADI (Iraq), Dec 27: A local chief of Al Qaeda who broke out of jail has been killed by Iraqi police snipers while two prisoners who escaped with him remain on the run, officials said on Saturday.

The 32-year-old shot by Iraqi forces was Imad Ahmed Farhan, nicknamed ‘Imad the Killer’ because police say he had confessed to murdering at least 100 people and setting over 100 roadside bombs.

According to police, Imad died in a fierce gunbattle after he had taken a family hostage at a home in Ramadi, capital of Anbar province in western Iraq.

Farhan and two Al Qaeda accomplices escaped from the Forsan police station in Ramadi early on Friday. Police had been carrying out a massive manhunt since Friday and found Farhan holed up in a house. They were alerted to his whereabouts when one of the hostages was able to get word to a neighbour.

“The female hostage got to the back of the house and was able to tell her neighbour that they were hostages and that a terrorist was there,” Colonel Salah Arar, commander of the southern sector of Ramadi police, said.

“We took a police unit and a sniper squad with us and we identified the room in the house where he was,” Arar said.

“One of our snipers shot him but only wounded him. Then as he tried to move across the roof from one house to another, one of our snipers shot him five or six times.”

Police Major Alaa al-Jassam said the other two operatives had given police the slip. “We surrounded this district after we killed Imad. We thought the other two were with him. We kept this area surrounded for two hours. We checked all houses, but in the end we did not find either of them,” he said.—AFP