Baghdad

U.S. military police kill 2 at Abu Ghraib

Baghdad, Iraq — U.S. military police killed two detainees at Abu Ghraib prison early Wednesday after a riot broke out in a tent camp at the sprawling facility west of the capital.

The brawl, in which five detainees were wounded by other detainees, was one of the deadliest skirmishes at Abu Ghraib since the U.S. Army began holding suspected insurgents, or security detainees, there last year.

The fight started when a group of detainees with tent poles attacked an individual in Camp Ganci, one of the prison’s two outdoor tent compounds, said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, spokesman for detention operations in Iraq. The brawl quickly escalated, drawing 200 to 300 men, he said.

U.S. military police responded by ordering the detainees to stop fighting, Johnson said. The detainees threw rocks at the guards, who fired back with rubber bullets, he said.

“That had no effect on quelling the disturbance,” he said. “A decision was made that this detainee’s life was at risk, so shotguns aimed at those behind the violence were used.”

Johnson said the rules of engagement at the prison allow military police to use deadly force in such a situation.

Najaf

Kidnappers threaten to kill journalist

A militant group said it has kidnapped a missing Western journalist and would kill him if U.S. forces did not leave the holy city of Najaf within 48 hours, Al-Jazeera reported today.

A group calling itself the Martyrs Brigade released a video to the pan-Arab television station that purported to show Micah Garen, who had been snatched off the streets of the southern city of Nasiriyah on Friday along with his Iraqi translator, Amir Doushi.

In the video, the kidnappers threatened to kill Garen within two days if U.S. forces did not leave Najaf, where they have been fighting with militants linked to militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr for two weeks.

Most of the insurgents behind the kidnappings of scores of foreigners here in recent months have been Sunni Muslims, not those aligned with al-Sadr or other Shiite groups.

When Shiite militants in the southern city of Basra kidnapped British journalist James Brandon on Friday and threatened to kill him, al-Sadr’s aides condemned them and pressured them to release him, which they quickly did.

At the time of his abduction, Garen, 36, was working on a story about the looting of archaeological sites in Iraq.