BAGHDAD — The bullet-riddled body of an Iraqi newspaper reporter was recovered Tuesday in Baghdad, as police in Basra launched an intensive search for a Western journalist working for CBS News and his Iraqi translator.
Journalists have been frequent targets in Iraq, which the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said remains the world’s most deadly country for media workers despite recent security gains.
The slain Iraqi journalist was identified as Hisham Muchawat Hamdan, a member of Iraq’s Young Journalists’ League who reported for three local newspapers.
Police and colleagues said the 27-year-old father of two disappeared Sunday on his way to the league’s offices in downtown Baghdad. His body was delivered to the city’s main morgue without identification, so officials there did not know whom he was until relatives turned up looking for him.
The discovery came on the same day as dozens of lawmakers walked out of Iraq’s parliament, thwarting the latest attempt to pass a national budget and other laws. The standoff underscored the suspicion that remains between the country’s major ethnic and religious factions, a major obstacle to the kinds of power-sharing arrangements that U.S. officials believe are key to long-term stability.
In Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, where rival Shiite Muslim militias have been vying for control, police cordoned off the Sultan Palace Hotel, the location they said the two CBS journalists were taken from Sunday in armored vehicles.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility. But Maj. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf, spokesman for Iraq’s Interior Ministry, said investigators had identified the “gang” holding the journalists and believed it had received help from inside the police force.
Followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr distanced themselves Tuesday from the journalists’ disappearance and called for their immediate release.
Muhannad Hashimi, an al-Sadr representative in Basra, said his movement’s dispute was with “the occupation forces and not with civilian foreigners, especially journalists.”
At least 15 other journalists, all of them Iraqis, are being held hostage in the country, Reporters Without Borders said in a statement Tuesday. “Yet again it is journalists who are paying dearly for the chronic insecurity in one of the country’s biggest cities,” the media freedom group said.
Iraqi parliamentarians have been arguing for weeks about the national budget, an amnesty bill and legislation governing the distribution of power between the central government and provincial authorities.
In a bid to break the deadlock, the main blocs representing the country’s majority Shiite groups, their Kurdish allies and the Sunni minority agreed to approve the three laws as a package at a rare night session Tuesday. But squabbling broke out over the order in which the bills should be voted.
