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BAGHDAD, March 26
-- A doctor has admitted killing at least 35 Iraqi
police officers and army soldiers by giving them
lethal injections, reopening their wounds or
engaging in other deadly acts while they were being
treated at a hospital in the northern Kurdish city
of Kirkuk, according to Kurdish security sources and
Kurdish television.
Kurdish television broadcast on Sunday what it said
was the doctor's taped confession, in which he told
police that he sympathized with the radical Sunni
Arab insurgent group Ansar al-Sunna. He said that
the group paid him to kill the men and that he did
it because "I hate the Americans and what they've
done to Iraq."
"I injected more than 35 policemen and soldiers,
including officers and some who were slightly
injured," the doctor, identified by a Kurdish
security official as Luay Omar Taie, said in the
taped statement. "I used to stop the breathing
machines or cut the electricity in the operations
room or reopen the wounds."
A senior official with the police intelligence
agency of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK),
who declined to be quoted by name, confirmed the
details of the case, which was first reported by the
Independent newspaper in London. The circumstances
of the alleged confession, including whether it
might have been coerced, could not be verified.
Taie was arrested following the detention of members
of a criminal gang with links to Ansar al-Sunna. The
gang is responsible for kidnapping more than 150
people and executing 18 of them, the PUK
intelligence official said. Arrests of insurgents
soon followed.
During interrogations, the insurgents identified
Taie as a doctor who had treated them. The
organization selected Taie because he was young and
wanted money, the official said.
In the statement aired on Kurdish television, the
doctor said he was paid up to $100 for each act he
committed. He asserted responsibility for killing
the assistant police chief in Kirkuk, Gen. Ajman
Abdullah, with a fatal injection and said he also
killed the general's brother, a soldier who was
admitted to the hospital after being wounded by a
roadside bomb.
The doctor said he helped a wounded insurgent escape
from the hospital. The intelligence official said
Taie also advised insurgents on how to forge
documents to claim that U.S. forces had shot their
members, so that they could be treated at a hospital
in Mosul, about 100 miles away.
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