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'I made a mixture of drugs and injected them.
They were dead in three hours'
Lieutenant Arjuman of the Kirkuk police lay
unconscious in the recovery room after a successful
operation to remove an insurgent's bullet from his
chest. His weary surgeons had gone home for the
night, satisfied a life had been saved.
Al-Jumhuriya hospital - Kirkuk's largest and busiest
- was quiet. At 10.30pm, a doctor moved along the
corridor on the second floor and entered the
recovery room. He leaned across the bed and turned
off the oxygen supply. Half an hour later, Lt
Arjuman was dead.
The deputy commander of the city's Miqdad police
station was the first of 43 victims of the doctor
whom Kirkuk residents are calling Doctor Death. Over
a six-month period, beginning in October, Dr Louay
Omar Mohammed al-Taei, moved among the puddles of
blood and crowds of wellwishers in al-Jumhuriya's
hectic emergency unit, quietly dispatching police
officers, soldiers and officials who had been
wounded, some only lightly, by insurgent attacks.
There was no apparent reason to suspect him. The
enthusiastic 26-year-old, who had graduated from
Mosul University in 2003, was always on hand when
there was a major incident, an explosive attack or a
gun battle, that resulted in mass casualties. Though
Kirkuk has been relatively quiet since the US
invasion in 2003, the past year has seen a surge in
violence across the province. Police say more than
1,500 people have been killed or injured. The medics
at al-Jumhuriya were glad of any help.
Ten days after he killed Lt Arjuman, Dr Louay struck
again. This time he used a method that would become
his favoured killing method - the injection of a
lethal cocktail of drugs. His victims were four
members of the Iraqi national guard, brought to the
hospital after being wounded in roadside bomb
attack.
"They came to the hospital to be cured, but instead
they were killed," said Kirkuk's police commander,
Yagdir Shakir. "I can understand a doctor may have
personal sympathies with the insurgency, but to use
his professional position to become an instrument of
death turns sense and humanity on its head."
'Killed without fuss'
Since his arrest last month by Kirkuk security
forces, Dr Louay has reportedly confessed to at
least 19 crimes. He killed, he said, because "I hate
the Americans and what they've done to Iraq." He
said he was convinced he could get away with it
because he "killed without fuss, and there were no
facilities at the hospital to perform proper
autopsies".
As well as killing the wounded, Dr Louay attended
members of the insurgency and helped wounded
militants escape their armed hospital guard. Kurdish
intelligence officers said his interrogation had
already yielded valuable information about a network
of doctors and health workers across the Sunni
triangle who are prepared to assist the insurgents.
News of the doctor's killing spree has shaken this
tense, contested city of 750,000 Kurds, Arabs and
Turkomans. Excerpts of the doctor's taped
confessions have been broadcast on local television.
"How can we feel safe to send our sick and injured
to hospital?" one resident, Ala Mohammed, asked
yesterday outside the hospital, which is one of only
a few modern structures in this dilapidated city. "I
have a son in the Iraqi national guard. He's a good
boy who wants to help his country. If he gets hurt
and comes here, who is to say that another doctor
won't be ready to kill him?"
Relatives of Dr Louay's victims are only now
realising how their loved ones died, and are coming
forward for compensation. Hospital officials
declined to discuss the case in detail, but
acknowledged its reputation in Kirkuk had been
"severely compromised".
Another doctor, who has since fled south to the
insurgent hotspot of Hawija, was suspected of
helping Dr Louay. Investigations are continuing, but
the hospital's management is not under suspicion,
say the Kirkuk police.
The Guardian has obtained the film made by Kirkuk
security officials of Dr Louay's "confession". It
has also seen medical records that appear to tally
with Dr Louay's claims. Wearing a grey polo-neck and
seated on a sofa, the doctor speaks calmly and
confidently into the camera. He looks to be in good
physical condition, saying at one point that he has
been treated well by his interrogators. His detailed
recall of names, dates and places does not appear to
be forced. Dr Louay says he was recruited into the
ranks of Ansar al-Sunna, one of Iraq's most lethal
Islamist groups, in August 2005 during a stint at
Kirkuk children's hospital.
"A father brought in his four-year-old son, who was
quite ill," Dr Louay says. "The boy stayed for some
time in the hospital, but we couldn't provide the
right medicine."
The father confronted him about the lack of
supplies. Dr Louay replied: "We live in an occupied
country, and this is the condition that prevails in
an occupied country." According to Dr Louay, the
father said: "We should not stay indifferent, we
should do something." There were some people who
were already taking action, he said, and "you seem
to be fed up with the current situation, so why
don't you help us?" Then the man, whom Dr Louay knew
as Abu Hajer, said: "We are from the resistance.
Whenever we want your help we will ask you."
The group, which was active in Kirkuk and the nearby
towns of Pirde and Tuz Khormatu, needed his skills
as a doctor, "to treat our injured members and help
us in emergency cases". "I told them I was not a
surgeon, but they said I should do first aid
treatment and then, if needed, the wounded fighters
could be transferred to other provinces or countries
for surgery." Abu Hajer promised his group would
target US forces only. He left, saying: "When we
need you, you will hear from us."
The call came a few weeks later. An Ansar militant
had been wounded while planting a bomb by the road
south of Kirkuk. "I said at first I had no first aid
supplies, but that I might be able to get a bag of
stuff taken from the hospital," Dr Louay says. "But
they said not to worry, they had all the supplies
they needed. And they did. I was taken to one of
their hideouts in caves near Kirkuk to treat the
wounded man."
Then came the killing of Lt Arjuman. "Abu Hajer
called me and said, 'A senior policeman is coming to
your hospital tonight.' That they had shot him but
failed to finish the job. He said, 'You can do it
for us.' I knew what he meant."
Experimented with dosages
Ten days later Dr Louay was instructed to do the
same with a group of Iraqi army officers who had
been wounded by a roadside bomb. "They had flesh
wounds to different parts of their bodies. So I made
a mixture of Valium, Voltaren and Decadron and
injected them. They were dead in three hours. The
medical department does not have the modern
equipment to analyse their blood, so nobody knew why
they died."
Over the next months, Dr Louay says he experimented
with varying dosages and cocktails of drugs
available at the hospital. "Sometimes if their
injuries were really serious and they were bleeding
a lot, I used Voltaren to keep them bleeding and
they would bleed to death in two hours."
One day a member of his cell rang to congratulate
him and to tell him that he was one of three
candidates picked to conduct suicide bombings
against Iraqi army bases in the city. "I agreed," he
says matter-of-factly, "but later there was another
call from another senior member saying, 'Forget
about it, we need you as a doctor.'"
Dr Louay says before his arrest he had become aware
of a network of doctors in Mosul, Hawija and Tikrit
to which wounded members of the Kirkuk cells would
sometimes be sent for surgery. "I got the impression
they had money and equipment," he says. "I asked to
be introduced to them, and Abu Hajer agreed."
Dr Louay's killings ended after Kurdish security
officers in nearby Sulaimaniya arrested a senior
member of Ansar al-Sunna, Malla Yassin, on February
24. Yassin was a former member of Ansar al-Islam,
the militant Kurdish-led group that reportedly
hosted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the run-up to the
invasion in 2003. A number of former Ansar al-Islam
fighters have since joined Ansar al-Sunna.
According to officials from the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan, which controls Sulaimaniya, Malla Yassin
"confessed immediately". Such intelligence helped
smash a network of at least 15 militants, Arabs and
Kurds, who were behind some of the deadliest attacks
in Kirkuk province, and to Dr Louay's arrest.
At the end of his filmed confession, the doctor is
asked whether he betrayed his profession. "We
thought we could do something to liberate the
country," he says. "Later our network went astray,
but we had to keep working, and we had to keep
committing these crimes."
He is then asked: "Did you ever think of giving up
and helping the government to arrest these
criminals?" He replies: "I never considered how
terribly brutal my crimes were, and I never thought
... I would be so easily captured. I got on so well
with all the people at the hospital. They seemed to
like me."
www.guardian.co.uk
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