Hundreds protest Falluja police chief's arrest (Roundup)

Jul 14, 2009, 15:10 GMT

Baghdad - Hundreds of people demonstrated in the Iraqi city of Falluja on Tuesday to protest the arrest of the city's former police chief on charges of working with al-Qaeda.

More than 200 people gathered in the city to demand the interior ministry release the city's former police chief, Colonel Faisal Ismail, and his deputy, Eissa al-Sari, witnesses told the German Press Agency dpa.

Police in Falluja told dpa they arrested the two on charges of working with al-Qaeda over the past three years and of involvement in several murders and illegal detentions during the same period.

They added that they had also arrested three men on suspicion of torturing and murdering an 11-year-old boy in al-Saqlawiya, some 12 kilometres north of Falluja, because his father was a police officer.

Once in detention, the men confessed to the crime and other crimes committed in the city, police said.

Falluja, some 60 kilometres west of Baghdad, is in the middle of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland. Following the US-led invasion of the country in 2003, it was the site of some of the worst fighting between US forces and Sunni insurgents.

Local Sahwa ('Awakening') militias allied with the government had largely pacified the city by last year, though recent attacks have sparked fears the calm may be cracking.

In one such attack, on June 25, three Iraqi policemen were killed by a roadside bomb as they patrolled an area east of the city. A fourth died when gunmen sprayed a checkpoint with automatic fire.

Iraq has seen an increase in insurgent attacks in the weeks preceding and following US soldiers' June 30 withdrawal from Iraqi cities and towns.

On Tuesday, police in Mosul, some 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, said they had imposed a curfew on predominantly Christian areas of the city and on the nearby, heavily Christian villages of Bartala and al-Hamdaniya.

Mosul's chief of police, General Khalid al-Hamdani, said the curfew had been imposed to protect Christians following apparently coordinated attacks against Iraqi churches on Sunday, and that four suspects had been arrested in connection with those attacks.

A series of bombs rocked Baghdad churches as worshippers were leaving services on Sunday, killing four people and wounding more than 30 others.

In the most serious attack, on a church on east Baghdad's Palestine Street, four people, including one Muslim, died, and more than 20 others were injured.

Police in Mosul first imposed the curfew on Monday, briefly lifted it, then imposed it again on Tuesday.

More than 1,000 Christian citizens of Mosul fled the city last year after a series of attacks against them.

Since then, Christian residents of the city have begun to return to their homes, and Christian residents of Baghdad remained defiant in the wake of Sunday's attacks.

'If anyone thinks that these terrorist attacks will force us or our friends from our home, they must be crazy,' said Nahla Sabbah, a 34-year-old civil servant.