One Person Killed Every Hour In Basra

[kpete]

Basra carnage escalates as one person killed every hour
By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil
Published: 17 May 2006

One person is being assassinated in Basra every hour, as order in Iraq's second city disintegrates, according to an Iraqi Defence Ministry official.

And a quarter of all Iraqi children suffer from malnutrition, a survey of 20,000 households by the Iraqi government and Unicef says.

The number of violent killings in Basra is now at a level close to that of Baghdad, and marks the failure of the British Army's three-year attempt to quell violence there. Police no longer dare go to the site of a murder because they fear being attacked. The governor of Basra, Mohammed Misbahal-Wa'ili, is trying to sack the city's police chief, claiming that the police have not carried out a single investigation into hundreds of recent assassinations.

The collapse of government authority in Iraq is increasing at every level and leaders in Baghdad have yet to form a cabinet, five months after parliamentary elections on 15 December.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article485489.ece

[NI4NI]

1. Good post., kpete

Your thread scooped Guy James today. Around 3:30, he was all over what's been happenning in Basra but left unreported. I haven't seen anything else.......K&R'd