10 Reportedly Die in Police Custody

Ten men arrested at a hospital while visiting relatives died after they were locked in a closed Iraqi police van for more than four hours in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees, a Sunni Muslim group charged Monday.

The incident came to light after an 11th victim regained consciousness and used his cellphone to call relatives for help, said the Muslim Scholars Assn., a prominent Sunni organization.

The victims, all Sunnis ranging in age from 20 to 30, were subsequently taken to a second Baghdad hospital by police who said the men were “terrorists” caught fighting the Americans, said a police source who confirmed most of the Muslim group’s account.

The deaths prompted harsh criticism from the Muslim Scholars Assn., which is often critical of U.S. actions in Iraq. It called the incident a violation of human rights and questioned whether police were engaging in “organized terrorism.”

The fatal episode came amid rising violence between Iraq’s two main religious groups, the Sunnis and the Shiite Muslims. Some fear that sectarian conflict could worsen and jeopardize the country’s fragile unity.

According to the Sunni organization, the incident began Saturday when U.S. troops allegedly fired on construction workers in Baghdad. It is unclear what prompted the shooting, but two men were wounded and taken to Noor Hospital.

On Sunday, when relatives and friends went to the hospital to visit the pair, 11 of the visitors were arrested. Among them was Dhia Azzawi, who was in the hospital because his wife was pregnant and happened to run into a cousin, whose brother was among the men reportedly shot by the Americans.

The police placed the arrested men in the van about 6 p.m. Sunday. It is unclear why they left them locked inside. When police opened the van more than four hours later, eight of the men were dead and the other three were unconscious.

The police took the victims to Yarmouk Hospital, where they told the staff that the men were insurgents and terrorists.

Azzawi, one of the unconscious men, woke up in the hospital around 6 a.m. Monday. He telephoned family members, who came and got him.

The other two men who arrived at the hospital alive subsequently died.

The Muslim Scholars Assn. alleges that the police tortured the arrested men before locking them in the van. The police source, who requested anonymity, said the bodies showed no sign of torture.

The Muslim Scholars Assn. Said, “They tortured them and left them in an airless chamber, which led to the suffocation of 10 of them.”

Elsewhere in the country Monday, insurgents killed nine Iraqi soldiers in an attack on a checkpoint in the town of Khalis, about 40 miles north of Baghdad. Later, a car bomb killed three people in the town.

The U.S. military reported three more deaths. A soldier was killed Monday when his patrol hit a land mine west of Baghdad. A day earlier, two Marines were killed by mortar fire in the western town of Hit.

At least 1,755 American service personnel have died since the war began in March 2003.

The United States also reported that American troops had killed 14 insurgents in Tall Afar, about 30 miles west of Mosul.

At a news conference in Baghdad, Iraqi Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi denied reports from meetings in Tehran last week that Iraq had reached an agreement with Iran to train some of its troops.

The report had aroused controversy because of hostility between the United States and Iran over its nuclear aspirations.

Iran and Iraq are predominantly Shiite but fought a war in the 1980s when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his Sunni minority ruled Iraq. In an attempt to put the war behind them, the two nations agreed to share information on militants who sought to cross the border and on the location of land mines left over from the war.

Iran also will donate $1 million to the Iraqi Defense Ministry, but Dulaimi said there was no discussion of Iran joining other nations, such as the U.S. and Jordan, in training Iraqi security forces.

“In Iraq we have 10 training centers with good equipment and talent, so we have the ability to train our forces ourselves,” the minister said.

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Times staff writers Caesar Ahmed and Suhail Ahmad contributed to this report.