Slain Germans ‘mistaken for Americans’

20 April 2004

BERLIN – An Iraqi insurgent leader says two German security agents were killed by his men at a roadblock in Fallujah earlier this month because they were “mistaken for Americans”.

Jabbar al-Qubaysi, head of the Iraqi National Patriotic Alliance, was quoted by Germany’s Spiegel TV as saying he regretted the killings.

“It is all very regrettable,” he told the German TV show, produced by Der Spiegel news magazine. “Had the men stopped at the roadblock and identified themselves as Germans, my men would have spared them.

“But they sped through the roadblock and were mistaken for Americans,” he said.

German intelligence was warned of a “highly dangerous situation” in strife-torn Fallujah more than a week before the two German security agents were killed at the roadblock there, another report said meanwhile.

The report in Focus news magazine, due to hit newsstands in Germany on Monday, quotes intelligence sources as saying the elite GSG-9 security escort undertook a hazardous convoy from Amman to the German embassy in Baghdad despite urgent warnings not to do so.

The two GSG-9 security agents were killed when their vehicle, the last in the six-vehicle convoy, came under attack from automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades fired by Iraqi insurgents when the convoy attempted to break through a roadblock at Fallujah.

The two men, ages 27 and 35, were en route to Baghdad to relieve two security agents at the German embassy there as part of a routine rotation of personnel.

The bodies of the two men have yet to be recovered.

The German Interior Ministry Saturday issued a statement saying only that the incident is still under review and that no comment would be given pending positive identification of the bodies.

DPA

Subject: German news