Free Republic

WITNESSES have reportedly told an Australian journalist how new Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi shot and killed up to six prisoners just days before his government took control of the country. A newspaper report today said the two witnesses saw Dr Allawi pull a pistol and execute suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station. Dr Allawi's office has denied the claims and branded them "outrageous". The witnesses said the handcuffed and blindfolded prisoners were lined up against a wall in a courtyard next to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre. They say...

THE editor of Melbourne's The Age newspaper has defended Australia's Journalist of the Year, Paul McGeough, in the wake of revelations that he may have erred in two significant reports he filed from Iraq. McGeough claimed in an article published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald that former Iraqi interim leader Iyad Allawi shot dead as many as six prisoners in June last year. But the story was discredited by a report yesterday that Iraqi officials and US special forces bodyguards assigned to Allawi had passed lie detector tests in denying the murder allegations. "My view is that...

Pentagon denies report on napalmMarch 24 2003The Pentagon has a denied a report in The Age on Saturday that napalm was used in an attack by US Navy planes on an Iraqi position at Safwan Hill in southern Iraq.A navy official in Washington, Lieutenant-Commander Danny Hernandez, said: "We don't even have that in our arsenal." The US military says it last used napalm in 1993 and destroyed its last batch of the weapon in 2001.The report was filed by Age correspondent Lindsay Murdoch, who is attached to units of the First US Marine Division.Murdoch's report was based on information from...