U.S. Concerned Iraqi Police Behind Attack

Thursday, March 11, 2004
(5:53 PM ET)
By Lee Keath

Associated Press Writer

``They were in police uniforms. We haven't established that it was the police,'' Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad. ``We are very concerned about it. We know that this has gone on ... that there are some policemen that have done criminal acts in the past.''

U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq L. Paul Bremer, second from left, is escorted on his arrival at U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division headquarters in Ramadi, 110 kilometers, 68 miles west of Baghdad, Iraq Thursday March 11, 2004. The division is soon to be replaced by the U.S. Marine Corps.

Image Credit: Peter Andrews -- AP Pool

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- AP
U.S. officials are worried that Iraqi police - not just impostors in Iraqi uniforms - may have been behind the killings of two coalition staffers and their translator, the top American general in Iraq said Thursday.

The three were the first civilians from the U.S. occupation authority to be killed in Iraq. Officials have not released their names, but relatives identified one of them as 33-year-old Fern Holland, a human rights expert from Oklahoma who worked on women's issues in the Hillah region where she was killed.

``If I die, know that I'm doing precisely what I want to be doing,'' Holland wrote in an e-mail to a friend in Tulsa on Jan. 21.

She met often with Iraqi women around Hillah and communicated their needs to Iraq's Governing Council, even influencing the interim constitution completed this week, said one of her colleagues, Judy Van Rest.

``She was extremely dedicated to what she was doing,'' Van Rest said. ``She carried a lot of hope with her about the future of Iraq.''

(More: Netscape Network News w/CNN)

2004 © The Associated Press.

Dan