Iraq Frees Hundreds of Prisoners in Nod to Sunnis

Iraqi authorities released nearly 600 prisoners Wednesday out of a total of 2,500 who are scheduled to be freed this week in an effort to appease Sunni Arabs who say their sect has been unjustly persecuted by Iraq’s police force.

A witness of one mass release at a Baghdad bus station said prisoners and their families wept at the sight of one another. Some of the prisoners looked wan and undernourished. A few struggled to walk.

Khayrulla Ibrahim Mohammed, 37, a laborer and member of the Sunni-led Iraqi Islamic Party, was freed after spending five months in the Abu Ghraib prison and a year at Camp Bucca. American troops arrested him in December 2004 as he prepared to leave his Baghdad home for dawn prayers at a local mosque. He said he was never formally charged in court with a crime.

“They accused us of holding terrorist meetings inside the Saydiya mosque,” Mohammed said, adding that U.S. soldiers interrogated him 15 times during his imprisonment.

“Frankly speaking, the American authorities were nice with me.... They never hurt me, and they respected my situation being a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party. I was truthful with them and they didn’t try to pressure me,” he said.

His family was allowed to visit him eight times, he said. He added that he never witnessed any mistreatment of prisoners by American soldiers.

“It was so unjust to keep me all this time because of suspicion or because of false reports by ill-intentioned groups,” Mohammed said. “Is it acceptable to detain a father for all this time just because of such reasons?”

Omar Jabouri, head of the Iraqi Islamic Party’s human rights office, said at least one of the freed prisoners had been held since July 2003.

More than 27,000 people are imprisoned in Iraq, U.S. officials say, about half of them in American-run facilities such as Abu Ghraib near Baghdad and Camp Bucca in the south. U.S. officials say many of the detainees have not been formally charged or tried in Iraq’s courts, which are able to handle only 20 to 50 cases a day. New prisoners continue to stream into the system.

A statement issued Wednesday by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s office said the release was a gesture of goodwill and an initial step in a yet-to-be-defined national reconciliation process, which he plans to formally kick off at an upcoming conference.

Maliki has not yet set a date or outlined a specific agenda for the reconciliation conference, other than to exclude people who have committed terrorist acts.

“The most important component of the national reconciliation project is unifying our discourse about taking responsibility for the rebuilding of Iraq,” Maliki said, promising to reveal more details of the plan later.

Also Wednesday, 15 of the 50 men kidnapped Monday from a downtown Baghdad bus depot by gunmen wearing police uniforms and driving police vehicles were freed. The men could not immediately be reached for comment, and the whereabouts of the other abductees were unknown.

On Tuesday, gunmen riding in four white pickup trucks similar to those used by police were confronted by Iraqi troops near the site of Monday’s kidnapping, an Interior Ministry source said. The drivers fled after a brief gun battle. No casualties were reported.

Elsewhere, U.S. mortar shells hit a house in Alsada, a village 15 miles north of Baqubah, and soldiers raided the home as military aircraft circled overhead, witnesses said. The shelling destroyed the house and two cars and killed a father and son, they said. Four other people were injured in the strike, including two women and an 8-month-old, they said. U.S. forces raided two neighboring homes and arrested four men.

U.S. military officials in Baghdad had released no information about the incident as of Wednesday night.

In the Mansour district of the capital, an improvised bomb targeted a police convoy, killing two officers and injuring three. Firefighters responding to the scene were hit by a second explosion, this time from a bomb in a car parked nearby. One fireman was injured.

Police cars heading toward the site were struck by a third blast, which caused no casualties.

Officials at Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad said 12 bodies arrived at the morgue there Wednesday from various parts of the capital.

It was unclear whether four policemen killed in a gunfight in the area were among them.

A car bomb in northwest Baghdad killed three Iraqis and injured 25 near a bakery.

An official at a hospital in Sadr City, a Shiite slum in the capital, said a man was killed and three were injured by a car bomb that exploded near an ice cream parlor.

In Buhruz, northeast of Baghdad, a bomb killed an Iraqi soldier and injured two, and armed men in the town shot two businessmen to death: a grocery owner and an auto parts store owner.

In the northern oil hub of Kirkuk, authorities discovered the body of Muslim cleric Khalifa Khaizaran, leader of a local mosque.

A riot broke out in the southern port city of Basra, where dozens of slayings over the last several weeks led Maliki to impose an army-enforced curfew to quell sectarian and political unrest.

Wednesday’s violence began as a protest against the government’s failure to provide electricity at a time when temperatures are in the triple digits.

Basra is one of Iraq’s biggest oil hubs.

Demonstrators set tires on fire and erected roadblocks. A witness said police fled as the protest turned violent.

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Special correspondents in Baghdad, Baqubah and Kuwait contributed to this report.