A militant Islamic group posted a chilling video on the Internet on Friday purporting to show the capture and execution of a survivor from the helicopter believed to have been brought down by an insurgent missile.
The videotape, bearing the logo of the Islamic Army in Iraq, appeared to affirm suspicions that the Russian made Mi-8 helicopter downed Wednesday was shot down by militants who raced to the scene of the burning wreckage. Eleven people died– six American private security contractors, the three-man Bulgarian crew and two Fijian security guards.
The tape shows the blazing wreckage of a helicopter and the charred bodies of two men lying nearby. “Zoom in,” a voice tells the cameraman in Arabic when one of the bodies is found. “See if there are any more Americans.”
Then the unseen cameraman comes across the figure of a man, dressed in a blue flight suit, lying in tall grass some distance away. “Look at this filth,” a voice says.
The Bulgarian company that owns the helicopter later identified the man as Lyubomir Kostov, the chief pilot, The Associated Press reported.
“Stand up, stand up,” says the voice, in English. “Hello. Give me a hand,” the man responds, in accented English.
A hand pulls the pilot to his feet, and the men ask him whether he has weapons. Then they order him, “go, go”, as though setting him free.
The pilot stumbles away, limping badly through the grass, and then the voice commands, in Arabic: “Carry out God’s law!”
As the pilot half turns, the men shout “God is great,” and an unseen gunman opens fire.
Meanwhile, the violence in Baghdad continued, with a fresh suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in the New Baghdad neighborhood that killed eight people and wounded 26 in the latest act of violence to target the country’s Shiite majority.
The U.S. military said that a soldier was killed Friday by a roadside bomb in Tal Afar, west of Mosul, and that another soldier died in a non-hostile incident at Camp Delta, 50 miles west of Baghdad.
This latest bombing coincides with heightened sectarian tensions after the discovery earlier this week of nearly 60 corpses, believed to be abducted Shiites, in the Tigris River south of Baghdad. Shiites suspect at least some of the bodies are those of the missing hostages reported captured last weekend in the town of Madain. The interim government dispatched troops to the area and, after failing to find any hostages, dismissed the reports as rumor.
At Friday prayers in Najaf, a Shiite cleric accused the Iraqi government’s intelligence services of carrying out killings in Madain and covering them up. “The terrorism in Madain was not committed by Sunnis but by the intelligence organizations,” said Sadraddin al-Qubanji.
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lsly@tribune.com
