Gunmen kill 17 Iraqi police trainers

29/10/2006 20h11

©AFP - Qassem ZeinBAGHDAD (AFP) - Gunmen killed 17 Iraqi police instructors and two translators as they travelled home from work at a British-run training school near the southern Iraqi city of Basra, a senior Iraqi officer told AFP.

The brutal killings in the south came as US troops fought off an insurgent ambush in northern Iraq, killing 17 rebels, and as Iraq's government urged Washington to grant it more control over its own armed forces.

"There were 17 officers and two translators on their way back home after they finished work when gunmen stopped them in an area called al-Kibla," the Iraqi officer said. "They work as instructors at the police academy in Shuaiba.

"They were killed and their bodies were taken back to Shuaiba and scattered around the town. The two translators work with the instructors and the British army and police," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Shuaiba is a town west of Basra that houses a large British base.

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23 policemen shot to death in Iraq

By STEVEN R. HURST, Associated Press Writer
Sun Oct 29, 5:31 PM ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Suspected Sunni Arab gunmen killed 23 policemen Sunday, including 17 in one attack in the predominantly Shiite southern city of Basra, signaling the possible start of an intensified insurgent campaign against Iraq's predominantly Shiite Muslim security forces.

Political tension deepened in Baghdad when Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, the country's highest-ranking Sunni politician, threatened to resign if Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did not act quickly to eradicate two feared Shiite militias.

Al-Maliki, a Shiite, depends heavily on the backing of the two Shiite political parties that run the militias and has resisted American pressure to eradicate the private armies — the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the Badr Brigade, the military wing of Iraq's biggest Shiite political bloc, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Shiite gunmen, especially those of the Mahdi Army, are deeply involved in the sectarian killings that have brutalized Baghdad and central Iraq for months.

Police have been targeted throughout the insurgency in an effort to destabilize the U.S.-supported government, but the number of attacks Sunday was a sharp step-up in attacks aimed at security services.

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