BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 12 - American officials said today that four men arrested in connection with the killing of two American civilians working for the American occupation authority were apparently members of the new 70,000-member American-trained Iraqi police force.
A fifth man seized in the killings was a former member of the police force under Saddam Hussein, an American spokesman said, while the sixth man was described as a civilian. The killings occurred on a road near the Shiite holy city of Karbala on Tuesday, when gunmen pursued the Americans and their Iraqi interpreter and raked them with automatic rifle fire.
The slayings have shocked the Americans here, who now face the possibility that the men to whom they turn for cooperation in fighting the insurgency may include insurgent infiltrators or those paid to do their work. When the killings were first reported, officials said the killers were rebels disguised as policemen, but they said Friday that four of the arrested men had current and valid documents identifying them as policemen. . . .
. . . United States officials say there are now 150,000 Iraqis serving in the newly reconstituted army, police, civil defense force and border guard, as well as a security force known as the Facilities Protection Service. . . . The Iraqi police have lost 325 men from insurgent attacks during the occupation, and with other Iraqi security units, have taken more casualties than American troops have, the Americans say.
Many of the Iraqis in the security forces, the Americans acknowledge, are veterans of Mr. Hussein's security forces who have been only hastily vetted for ties to the brutality of the past and given only short courses in Western-style practices and values.
In the case of the new police force, American officials say, about 90 percent of the recruits were policemen during Mr. Hussein's rule, and most of them have been given uniforms and weapons after what the Americans call a "transition and integration program," a three-week course in Western styles of policing, respect for the law and concern for individual and community rights. . . .
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/13/international/middleeast/13IRAQ.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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