BAGHDAD — The United Nations has called on Iraq to conduct an independent investigation into the killings of 34 people at an Iranian opposition base after Iraqi authorities, who authorized a raid on the camp, suggested that the group might have executed its own members.
Wildly conflicting accounts of how members of the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran (PMOI) were killed have highlighted the dilemma over the last remaining stronghold of the group invited in by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and disarmed by the United States.
In a statement issued late Saturday, the United Nations said it expected a commission of inquiry pledged by the Iraqi government to be independent. But that panel will include Iraqi military officials and a cross-section of political parties and is unlikely to meet that requirement, according to Iraqi government officials.
Iraqi government spokesman Ali Dubbagh said last week that some of the dead were likely executed by camp leaders trying to prevent them from leaving.
Saad al-Muttalibi, an adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said forensic tests, including some by U.S. experts, have been completed on the bodies to determine whether a medical team’s initial findings had been correct.
“They were shot execution- style,” al-Muttalibi told the Christian Science Monitor. He also said they appear to be have been shot with handguns rather than the rifles used by the Iraqi military.
The U.N. confirmed last week that it had seen 28 bodies in a visit to the camp and knew of six others. It said dozens more had been injured in the operation before dawn on April 8, when Iraqi forces moved in to reclaim part of the huge base 70 miles north of Baghdad.
Speaking to reporters taken to Camp Ashraf after the raid but barred from talking to camp members, Iraqi military officials displayed slingshots and homemade weapons they said the PMOI had used to attack Iraqi soldiers. Women, they said, had tried to gouge out the soldiers’ eyes.
