Iraqis hit by frenzy of crime

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — The kidnappers holding an Iraqi auto mechanic’s 11-year-old son gave him just two days to come up with $100,000 in ransom. When he could not, they were just as quick to deliver their punishment: They chopped off the boy’s head and hands and dumped his body in the garbage.

The boy’s final words to his father came in an agonizing phone call. “Daddy, give them the money. They are beating me,” Muhsin Mohammed Muhsin pleaded a day before he was killed.

As the worst of the country’s sectarian bloodshed ebbs, Iraqis now face a new threat to getting on with their lives: a frenzy of violent crime.

Many of those involved are believed to be battle-experienced former insurgents unable to find work. They often bring the same brutality to their crimes that they showed in the fighting that nearly pushed the country into a Sunni-Shiite civil war in 2006 and 2007.

The result has been a wave of thefts and armed robberies, hitting homes, cars, jewelry stores, currency exchanges, pawn shops and banks.

Kidnapping, too, remains terrifyingly common, as it was during the peak of the insurgency. Now, however, the targets are increasingly children, and the kidnappers, rather than having sectarian motives, are seeking ransoms.

In southern Baghdad’s Saydiyah neighborhood, photos of missing children are pasted on electricity poles and the concrete blast walls that enclose many areas of the bomb-battered capital.

There are few statistics tracking the number and kinds of crimes, in part because the government remains focused on the bombings and other insurgent attacks that continue to plague Baghdad and Iraq’s north.

To cope, some businesses are hiring more guards and even taking their money out of Iraqi banks, believing it will be safer in secret locations under private guard or in banks outside the country.

Iraqi military spokesman Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said investigations found that up to 70 percent of the criminal activity is carried out by former insurgent groups or by gangs affiliated with them — partly explaining the brutality of some of the crimes.

Some members of Iraq’s security forces are also involved, perhaps a sign that militants are still infiltrating the security services.

In August, two gunmen in their 20s broke into a neighbor’s house in Baghdad’s southern Dora district, beheading a father and his 1-year-old daughter and severely injuring her mother and another child. They stole 5 million Iraqi dinars, or about $4,300, and some jewelry.

They were arrested the next day. One of them was a former soldier who left the Iraqi army seven months ago.