5 Witnesses Insist Iraqis Didn't Fire On Guards

The eyewitnesses -- three traffic policemen and two maintenance workers who were interviewed separately -- offered a dramatically different account of the events in Nisoor Square.

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Traffic police officer Sarhan Thiab said that shortly after noon he saw two Blackwater convoys, minutes apart, come through the traffic circle. Following procedure, he and other traffic officers ordered cars to stop entering the circle to allow the convoys to pass.

Fifteen minutes later, a third Blackwater convoy of four gray REVA armored vehicles arrived. Unlike the two previous convoys, this one swerved left and rolled into the circle against the flow of traffic, the eyewitnesses said. Such a move made it more difficult for the traffic policemen to slow down vehicles that were driving directly into the convoy.

The Blackwater guards threw water bottles in the circle to halt traffic, Thiab said. He and another officer, Ali Khalaf, walked into two intersections to stop traffic heading toward the convoy, which had stopped in a semicircle.

Suddenly, guards fired on a white sedan that did not slow down quickly enough, the witnesses said. The car kept moving forward, but not in a threatening way, said Khalaf, who has given his account to U.S. and Iraqi investigators.

"The car went on rolling slowly. But they kept on shooting," said Khalaf, who ran for cover. Thiab and other witnesses said that they heard loud booms and that the vehicle burst into flames, killing the female passenger.

In seconds, there was shooting in all directions, eyewitnesses said. People were fleeing their cars and running for cover. Afterward, dead and wounded were found in almost every direction, police said.

Eyewitnesses also disputed the Blackwater guards' account that civilians were firing from a red bus. Hussam Abdul Rahman, 25, another traffic policeman who was near the bus, said passengers were kicking out the windows in a desperate attempt to escape the firing.

"There were many on this bus. They were hardly able to walk and they were screaming," Khalaf said.

The senior Iraqi police official also rejected Blackwater's account of being ambushed by gunmen. Nisoor Square, he said, sits in front of the National Police headquarters. There were checkpoints, Iraqi army and police, nearby in nearly every direction, making it hard for gunmen to take positions to ambush the convoy.

The police guards in the square, he added, would not shoot without orders. The square is a common route for dozens of heavily armored U.S. military and embassy convoys. Anyone planning an attack would use heavy weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades -- not guns, the official said. "To attack body-armored vehicles with bullets? No one can believe this," the police official said.

Both the State Department and the Defense Department have maintained they have no choice but to contract out security and other functions in an era of downsized government and increased international danger. "As long as the security threats continue at the level they are now, we're going to have to figure out a way" to protect civilians operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots, Kennedy said. "How that is done is the purpose of the review."

Kennedy's team includes retired NATO commander Gen. George A. Joulwan; J. Stapleton Roy, a former senior diplomat who is now vice chairman of Kissinger Associates; and Eric Boswell, a senior official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Defense Department this week sent its own five-man team to Iraq for a parallel review of contractor security operations.

DeYoung reported from Washington. Correspondent Steve Fainaru in El Cerrito, Calif., and special correspondent Saad al-Izzi in Baghdad contributed to this report.