By Mussab Al-Khairalla and Paul Tait
Reuters
Friday, September 21, 2007
6:00 AM
BAGHDAD, Sept 21 -- Iraq wants to tighten control over security contractors after a deadly shooting incident involving the U.S. firm Blackwater, ending their long immunity from Iraqi prosecution, the Interior Ministry said on Friday.
Spokesman Major-General Abdul-Kareem Khalaf said the ministry had drafted legislation giving it wider powers over the contractors and calling for "severe punishment for those who fail to adhere to the ... guidelines on how they should operate".
Iraq has said it would review the status of all security firms after what it called a flagrant assault by Blackwater contractors in which 11 people were killed while the firm was escorting a U.S. embassy convoy through Baghdad on Sunday.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki suggested the U.S. embassy should stop using Blackwater and said he would not allow Iraqis to be killed "in cold blood".
The shooting has incensed Iraqis who regard the tens of thousands of security contractors working in the country as private armies that act with impunity.
Khalaf said the new draft law, which he expected parliament to pass soon, gives the ministry powers to prosecute the companies and to refuse or revoke contracts.
Many security firms operating in Iraq have no valid licence. A law issued by U.S. administrators after the 2003 invasion which overthrew Saddam Hussein granted them immunity from prosecution and has not been formally revoked.
The New York Times reported on Friday that the interior ministry will also propose that foreign security companies be replaced by Iraqi firms.
"These American companies were established in a time when there was no authority or constitution," the newspaper quoted a ministry report as saying.
NEW RULES
The head of an association of security firms in Iraq said replacing foreign companies with Iraqi security companies was not a new suggestion and was unlikely to happen overnight.
"One alternative would be partnerships with Iraqi companies, putting an Iraqi face on what we're doing," Lawrence Peter, director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, told Reuters.
Peter said around 30,000 people, half of them Iraqis, worked for security firms in Iraq.
U.S. and Iraqi officials have launched a joint inquiry into Sunday's deadly shooting incident involving Blackwater.
An embassy spokeswoman said on Thursday the company, which employs around 1,000 contractors to protect the U.S. mission and its diplomats, was "still here and still under contract from the State Department".
Fearing reprisals, the United States has barred diplomats from road travel out of central Baghdad's "Green Zone", the heavily fortified district which is protected from the worst of the bloodshed in the Iraqi capital.
In the latest violence, one U.S. soldier was killed on Thursday by a bomb which exploded near his vehicle in Diyala province, east of Baghdad, the military said.
In the southern city of Basra gunmen shot dead Sheikh Amjad al-Jinabi, a religious aide to Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani on Thursday evening after he had attended a funeral in the Shi'ite city, Sistani's office said.
Another Sistani aide was killed in a drive-by shooting in Diwaniya, 180 km (110 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.
Some Shi'ite mosques in Basra cancelled Friday prayers in protest at the killings, residents said.
Maliki, whose government has been criticised for failing to pass laws seen as vital to reconciling Iraq's warring majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs, met Sunni Arab lawmakers on Thursday, his office said.
Maliki agreed to look into the political demands of the Sunni Accordance Front, which pulled out of his Shi'ite-led government last month protesting his failure to address their demands for a greater say in government.
(Additional reporting by Aref Mohammed in Basra and Aws Qusay in Baghdad)
REUTERS Reut05:50 09-21-07