IRAQ: A top aide to Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari condemned a US raid on a Shia mosque in Baghdad which killed 20 people yesterday as a "policy of aggression".
"I demand a full investigation of this crime," said Jawad al-Maliki, a member of the Dawa party. Shia officials rarely criticise the US whose troops also arrested more than 40 Interior Ministry personnel guarding a secret prison.
Details were sketchy but the two operations looked like US strikes against sectarian Shia militias of the kind the US ambassador said on Saturday must be eliminated if Iraq is to form a unity government and halt a slide toward civil war.
The US military made no immediate official comment but US sources confirmed that American and Iraqi forces had detained 41 Interior Ministry personnel guarding a secret bunker complex.
Most foreigners in detention are accused of being Sunni al-Qaeda fighters who come to Iraq to fight Americans and Shias.
In November US troops freed 173 mostly Sunni prisoners, some of whom had been tortured, from a secret Interior Ministry facility in Baghdad.
Iraqi police and residents said a US raid on a Shia mosque in the Shaab district of east Baghdad sparked fierce clashes with militiamen of the Mehdi Army loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. A medical source at Yarmouk hospital said he saw 18 bodies of Iraqis killed in the operation. Police sources said 20 Mehdi Army fighters were killed in the fighting, close to Sadr's stronghold in the Sadr City slum, and five vehicles belonging to the militia were burned.
A senior aide to Sadr, in comments capable of inflaming passions among the radical cleric's supporters, accused US troops of shooting dead more than 20 unarmed worshippers at the Mustapha mosque after tying them up. The mosque's faithful follow Sadr but the aide denied they were Mehdi Army gunmen. "The American forces went into Mustapha mosque at prayers and killed more than 20 worshippers," Hazin al-Araji said. "They tied them up and shot them."
Earlier, in an unusual admission, Interior Ministry officials said a police major accused of taking part in death squad killings had been arrested in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad.
Arkan al-Bawi, who works in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad and is the brother of the provincial police chief, was detained after visiting the ministry.
Sunni Arabs accuse the Shia-led government of sanctioning death squads, which the government denies despite mounting evidence, including accusations by the US State Department, that they operate with impunity.
Hundreds of bodies have been found since the bombing of the Shia shrine last month in Samarra, which left Iraqi leaders openly speaking of civil war for the first time but which has failed to jolt them into a deal on a new government.
In an indication of the scale of the problem, Iraqi forces said they could not identify 30 bodies found on the main street of a village near Baquba yesterday. Most had been beheaded. Iraqi army officials said the corpses were found in Mulla Eed.