Former official escapes from jail

Robert Gates officially took over as defense secretary.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An Oak Brook, Ill., engineer facing corruption charges from his tenure as Iraq's minister of electricity has escaped from a police station in central Baghdad, reportedly escaping custody with the help of men wearing what appeared to be American military uniforms, Iraqi officials said Monday.
The alleged jailbreak by Aiham Alsammarae is the latest twist in the saga of the dual Iraqi-American citizen, who moved to the Chicago area 30 years ago, then returned to Iraq and served as a minister in the first postwar Iraqi government, only to find himself accused of corruption and locked in a cell.
Alsammarae had repeatedly expressed fears for his safety, and had recently received information that government officials were plotting to kill him, said his daughter, Dania Alsammarae, who is living in Dublin. She speculated that he had made his way to Irbil in Kurdistan, but she said she had not spoken to him since Friday.
"He did what was necessary to save his life," she said in a telephone interview.
Warning
Meanwhile, on his first day as defense secretary, Robert Gates warned Monday that failure in Iraq would be a "calamity" that would haunt the United States for years. Underscoring eroding security there, a Pentagon report said the number of insurgent and sectarian attacks had risen to the highest level in years.
Sworn into office as the Bush administration moves toward revamping its strategy in Iraq, Gates sketched out an agenda of reversing the downward spiral in Iraq, attending to resurgent violence in Afghanistan and pushing for the military modernization that was a priority of his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Gates said he intends to travel soon to Iraq to hear commanders' assessments of the situation on the ground and to gain their advice -- "unvarnished and straight from the shoulder" -- on how to adjust U.S. war strategy. He said he would give President Bush honest advice and listen to military commanders -- a contrast to critics' complaints that Rumsfeld was an ideologue who paid scant heed to top officers.
The escape
According to Iraqi officials, Alsammarae was taken from a police station in the heavily fortified Green Zone by a group of five foreigners, who they said appeared to be Americans and wore uniforms resembling those worn by the U.S. military. However, the officials cautioned, the account given by the police at the station has not been independently corroborated, and the exact circumstances of the disappearance are still under investigation.
The five purported foreigners drove up to the station in two GMC trucks about 2:30 p.m. Sunday and left with Alsammarae, who had been incarcerated there since August, said Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, head of the Commission of Public Integrity, the government body responsible for investigating and prosecuting corruption cases.
Only three of the dozens of Iraqi police normally based at the station were on duty at the time, and they did not attempt to stop the foreigners. Al-Radhi suspected that the men who came for Alsammarae were private security contractors and said he did not know their nationality.
"He had hired a private security firm and they were with him all through this case," he said. "They were wearing uniforms that looked like U.S. military uniforms, but I am not saying they were U.S. soldiers or even that they were American.
"The police officers didn't resist because they were scared of those security forces," said al-Radhi, citing the account given by the police. "Almost all of the police were absent because they were out on missions at the time."