Iraqi police shoot dead prisoners

reuters/asharqalawsat: Iraqi police shot dead several prisoners in a shootout on Wednesday at a Baghdad military base after one prisoner grabbed a weapon from a guard and opened fire, Interior Ministry officials and police sources said.

Up to six guards were killed, one police source said, before security forces began firing into the unarmed prisoners.

There was confusion over casualty figures. Another police source and an Interior Ministry official initially said more than 20 prisoners were killed but a second official insisted there were 15 casualties in all, some only wounded, and that these included one dead guard and one wounded officer.

Later, a source at Baghdad police headquarters said it was still unclear just how many people were killed but that the first prisoner to seize a rifle had shot dead six guards.

The various accounts converged in saying that the trouble began when the prisoner grabbed a weapon from one of the guards and shot him. One Interior Ministry official said that the guard was wounded while a second prisoner also took a Kalashnikov rifle from another guard and shot him dead.

A police source said the prisoners, being held at the Adala Iraqi army base -- known to U.S. forces as Camp Justice -- in the northern, Shi''ite district of Kadhimiya, were on a morning recreation break when the incident began. Read more