Explosions and gunfire rang out in Baghdad Saturday, but no American troops were reported killed, a military spokesman said, according to AP.
In Baghdad's al-Shoala neighborhood, the commander of Iraq's national police academy was wounded in a raid against suspected carjackers, police told The Associated Press. There were also reports that shots were fired along the main highway leading to the northern city of Mosul, where Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay were killed Tuesday.
Iraq. Brig. Ahmed Kadhim, 56, was shot around 1 a.m. while leading a police raid, said his assistant, Capt. Mushtak Fadhil. He said several Iraqi policemen were trying to detain five suspected carjackers when shots were fired. Kadhim was shot in the right calf and taken to a hospital and later released. Five other policemen were wounded, including one critically. The five were arrested.
Meanwhile, Arabs continued to debate whether videotape of the brothers released Friday would convince people of their deaths. Both bodies were displayed to journalists in a further attempt by American occupation authorities to prove that the two are really dead.
The newspaper Azzaman wrote about the bodies, but pointed out that few Iraqi journalists were allowed to see the brothers.
Arab satellite media and CNN broadcast images of the bodies throughout Iraq and the Arab world. The corpses appeared markedly changed from the autopsy-style photographs released a day earlier. The thick beards, grown, officials said, during 3 1/2 months on the run, were shaved and trimmed, their faces rebuilt and a gash gone from the face of the body identified as Uday.
Hamza Mansour, secretary-general of the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, said the display violated Islamic custom.
"The bodies of Uday and Qusay should have been washed, shrouded and buried immediately, but the Americans have no respect for our traditions and doctrine and they acted in a very unethical manner," he said.
"What happened is a mutilation of the body of the dead," said Souad Saleh, an Islamic theologian who sits on a committee entrusted with issuing fatwas, or edicts, at Egypt's Al-Azhar University. "But the Americans are infidels, and whatever Islam says doesn't apply to them," he said.
Sheikh Abdul-Aziz al-Qassim, a Saudi lawyer and a former judge, said the handling of the bodies by U.S. authorities in Iraq contravened Islamic law as well as the rules of war, arguing that Uday and Qusay died as soldiers who were killed in battle.
"It goes against Islamic sharia laws to display bodies of fallen soldiers to influence enemy morale," al-Qassim told the AP.
Another scholar from the Gulf Arab region saw the display of the bodies as inhumane, although he described the two sons as criminals. "This is a political game to instill fear in the hearts of others that follow their path or support them," said Sheik Adil Isa, a Sunni Islamic scholar from Bahrain. (Albawaba.com)
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
