BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — Backed by tanks, British soldiers raided a police station in the southern city of Basra on Monday and killed seven gunmen in an effort to stop renegade Iraqi officers from executing their prisoners, the British military said.
The British forces transferred the prisoners, who showed evidence of torture, then evacuated the building before blowing it up.
The operation showed how closely aligned some police units are with militias and death squads — and the challenges coalition forces face as they transfer authority for security to Iraqis.
In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded beside a market and a suicide bomber detonated explosives in a bus in separate attacks on civilians, killing 14 people and wounding at least 33.
Police in Baghdad said Monday that they found 40 bodies, apparent victims of sectarian violence. On Monday evening, a mortar shell hit a house in northern Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding a third.
In the Basra raid, the British set out to arrest officers with the station”s serious crimes unit, who were suspected of involvement with Shiite death squads. Seven members of the rogue police unit were apprehended three days ago in other raids, said a British spokeswoman, Royal Navy Lt. Jenny Saleh.
“We had intelligence to indicate that the serious crimes unit would execute its prisoners in the coming days, so we decided to intervene,” Saleh said.
British troops were fired on as they approached the station and their return fire killed seven gunmen, said Maj. Charlie Burbridge, another British military spokesman.
British and Iraqi forces transferred all 76 prisoners at the station to another facility in downtown Basra, he said. Some prisoners had “classic torture injuries” such as crushed hands and feet, cigarette and electrical burns and gunshot wounds to the knees, Burbridge said.
The British demolished the building to help disband the unit. “We identified the serious crimes unit as, frankly, too far gone,” Burbridge said. “We just had to get rid of it.”
The unit”s members, he alleged, were involved in tribal and political feuds in the mostly Shiite south, rather than sectarian reprisal killings like those that have terrorized mixed neighborhoods of Baghdad.
Most of Britain”s 7,200 troops in Iraq are based in the Basra area.
Mohammed al-Askari, a spokesman for Iraq”s Defense Minsitry, said the operation was coordinated with the Iraqi government. “Multinational forces got approval for this raid from this ministry and with participation of the Iraqi army,” he said.
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who is in charge of training Iraqi forces, said in Washington last week that efforts were under way to weed out Iraqi national police believed to be sympathetic to the militias. Up to a quarter are thought to aligned with the militias, which are engaged in sectarian violence.
The establishment of a viable Iraqi police force is vital to the U.S.-led coalition”s goal of transferring responsibility for security to Iraqis so foreign troops can return home.
The deaths came a day after Iraq”s interior minister said attacks targeting police had killed some 12,000 officers sincew the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein.
