Arrest warrant for Iraqi reporter in family massacre claim (Roundup)

Nov 29, 2007, 15:46 GMT

Baghdad - Iraq's ministry of interior has issued a warrant for the arrest of an Iraqi reporter who claimed his 11-member family had been killed, independent Voices of Iraq reported Thursday citing ministry spokesman general Abdul-Karim Khalaf.

According to Khalaf, Iraqi journalist Diyaa al-Kawaz, currently living in Jordan, said his family had been shot dead in Baghdad by insurgents and accused the security authorities of being involved in the operation.

However, the family members, who live in Kut city, south-east of Baghdad, and not in the capital as claimed, refuted the allegations Wednesday.

Al-Kawaz would be sued by the Iraqi court for making false allegations against the security forces, Khalaf was quoted by VOI as saying.

Al-Kawaz is the editor of the Iraq News Network, an online news website.

Also Thursday, six people were wounded in a bomb in Baghdad Thursday amid reports that a Tikrit councillor and a US soldier had been killed in separate attacks.

The roadside bomb hit a public bus on Thursday morning, injuring six passengers on the main Palestine road in north-east Baghdad, police sources told the Voices of Iraq news agency.

The US military announced Thursday that a US soldier was killed in a small firearms attack in western Baghdad Wednesday.

The attack brings the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq in November to 35.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, the head of a district council was killed by armed men outside his home, a police officer, Badr Hamid, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

In another attack, the home of another district council head in the city was badly damaged by a bomb.

Several district council heads in Tikrit have received death threats and have asked for government protection, Hamid said.

The death threats came after the district officials asked families, which had fled their restive areas and settled in the city and the nearby province of Salahaddin, to return to their homes, according to Ahmad al-Fahl of the anti-terrorist police force in the province.

The security situation is improving in Baghdad and Ramadi, where many displaced families come from.

The VOI press agency reported Thursday that 20 buses with Iraqi refugees on board had returned from Syria.

According to the reports, the government had sent the buses to the border to fetch those willing to return. Those returning said that the reports of improvements in the security situation had encouraged them to return, the reports said.

Iraq's Kurdish Autonomous Region said on Thursday it would seal more oil deals with foreign firms next month in clear defiance of the Baghdad central government which is increasingly uneasy about the region's drive for independence.

The Kurdish region's minister of natural resources, Ashti Hurami, said his government was set to sign two oil contracts next month.

Some 20 foreign oil firms are working in the Kurdish region and 20 more will join them next year, according to the minister.

Hurami's statement was carried by the website of the region's government.

Iraq's minister of oil, Hussein al-Shahristani, last week reignited the controversy over the scope of rights given to Iraq's provinces under the existing constitution, in which the federal system is enshrined.

Al-Shahristani declared oil contracts singed by the increasingly independent Kurdish region void, saying only the central government in Baghdad was entitled to seal oil deals.

Joining a chorus of Kurdish objection, Hurami said the Iraqi constitution gave his region the right to make oil deals and reprimanded al-Shahristani for 'meddling in the region's internal affairs.'