Iraq’s Olympic Chief and Dozens of Colleagues Kidnapped

Heavily armed men in camouflage and police uniforms swarmed a downtown cultural center Saturday and kidnapped the head of Iraq’s Olympic committee and dozens of colleagues in broad daylight, even as the new interior minister spoke of punishing lawbreakers within his ranks.

Two U.S. service members were killed in Baghdad on Saturday, the victims of separate roadside bomb explosions, and at least 30 Iraqis were reported slain nationwide.

Interior Minister Jawad Bolani, an engineer with no policing experience, was appointed last month to take over a ministry that officials say is rampant with brutality and corruption. He vowed Saturday to fight criminality and violence within the police force by setting up new commissions and numbering police vehicles to prevent them from being used illegally.

The ministry has been Iraq’s most troubled institution, the alleged wellspring of Shiite Muslim death squads terrorizing Sunni Arab communities and of secret prisons where inmates were tortured. Bolani’s predecessor, Bayan Jabr, was accused by Iraqi and U.S. critics of tolerating such abuse.

With residents living in fear of armed men who rule the streets, security has become Iraqis’ paramount concern. Despite a monthlong security crackdown in Baghdad, Bolani said that 40 car bombs had exploded in the city and that 17 were discovered and dismantled.

Suspected Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents have rampaged through neighborhoods, carrying out street-side executions. Mass kidnappings, often by men in squad cars dressed in police uniforms, are escalating.

A source in Baghdad’s police operations center said 51 people were kidnapped in the Olympic committee incident, but witnesses estimated 30 to 40 were abducted, including committee leader Ahmed Hajiya, athletes, guards and support staff.

“They immediately handcuffed the guards, forcing some of them to lie down and the others to face the wall,” said Idrees Salih, a witness.

Insurgents have slain figures from all walks of Iraqi society, from members of the nascent political class to law enforcement officials to university professors. But what appears to be the systematic and growing targeting of athletes -- many of them young, apolitical teenagers from poor neighborhoods -- has shocked Iraqis already numb to daily violence.

Two months ago, 17 members of a Baghdad taekwondo club were kidnapped on their way to Jordan, where they hoped to obtain visas for a U.S. tournament. Their fate is unknown. The head of the country’s taekwondo association was among those kidnapped Saturday.

Interior Ministry officials said the abductions were not part of an authorized police operation. Police uniforms can be bought easily in Iraq, and it was unclear whether the uniformed men were officers or impostors.

Bolani walks a dangerous line in trying to get his forces to confront such security problems. He is under pressure from the militia loyalists who form his political coalition’s rank and file; career police officers demanding better working conditions, pay and equipment; and U.S. advisors pressing for accountability.

Bolani plans to move his offices out of a luxurious palace in the U.S.-protected Green Zone to the massive Interior Ministry compound in a dangerous part of northern Baghdad, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

At his Green Zone news conference Saturday, Bolani said he had already begun transferring authority over the ministry’s prisons to the Justice Ministry and meeting with Sunni Arabs, who accuse Iraqi police of torturing and executing young men, often rousting them from bed at gunpoint in the early-morning hours.

He tacitly acknowledged the ministry’s problems, saying, “We inherited these conditions.” But he also praised the police as noble public servants. At least 3,000 members of the Iraqi force have been killed since 2003, he said.

“Those police who are fallen shed blood for the people of Iraq,” he said. “They uphold life and establish safety and security for all the people of Iraq.”

In violence targeting security personnel Saturday, a pair of roadside bombs struck a U.S.-Iraqi patrol in southeast Baghdad, killing at least one American and six Iraqis, the U.S. military and Iraqi police said.

Another American, a member of the 49th Military Police Brigade, was killed hours earlier when his Humvee struck a roadside bomb near Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood.

Two Iraqi police officers were killed in a roadside bombing in the capital’s northeast.

Officials at Yarmouk Hospital said they had received the bodies of 10 men recovered in western and southern Baghdad, all shot execution-style.

A car bombing in Kirkuk, apparently aimed at the leader of a political party representing Iraq’s Turkmen minority, injured 10 Iraqis in a crowded marketplace in the city center. Turkmen Front leader Saaddin Arkij escaped unharmed.

Gunmen near the northern city also killed a soldier, a police officer and a civilian in separate incidents Friday night and early Saturday. An explosion in an office building Saturday killed one person and injured 16.

Assailants near Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad, killed three brothers, two of them off-duty Iraqi soldiers, police said. A roadside bomb targeting a nearby Iraqi army convoy killed two people.

Two police officers were killed in gunfights with insurgents in Fallouja, where attacks on law enforcement are growing, an Iraqi police officer said. A suicide bomber at a checkpoint in downtown Ramadi killed at least one Iraqi soldier, an official said.

Five Indian employees of a foreign contractor in southern Iraq were kidnapped at the Kuwaiti border, said police in Basra, a once-quiet city that has descended into lawlessness. Four people died Friday night after gunfire erupted during a dispute about who was first in line at a gas station.

Despite the daily shootings, bombings and kidnappings, U.S. officials say the situation is improving.

“Every single day there is a bit of progress made in Iraq in terms of strengthening government institutions,” Margaret Scobey, political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said Saturday.

Times staff writer Shamil Aziz and special correspondents in Baghdad, Baqubah, Basra, Fallouja, Kirkuk and Ramadi contributed to this report.