Iraqi and US troops looking for alleged kidnappers raided the health ministry, arresting five suspects. The government also declared that it had arrested a 16-member gang alleged to have been plotting attacks on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's family.
"Acting on an Iraqi citizen's tip regarding kidnap victims, Iraqi forces with US advisers searched the Ministry of Health at about 2:30 am and detained five for further questioning," an official from the US army said Sunday, according to AFP. "It is for the benefit of the Iraqi people that these forces conducted the search and detained the suspects for further questioning," said the official.
Ministry spokesman Qasim Yahiya denounced the raid and said staff had launched an open-ended strike in protest. He demanded that Maliki's cabinet reign in US forces and threatened to lodge a complaint before an Iraqi court.
The health ministry is headed by Ali al-Shamari, a Shiite minister who is a member of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) party and is regarded as close to the anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Meanwhile, Baghdad's violence continued with more victims washing up along the Tigris River. "An army patrol picked up 12 corpses, most of them in civilian clothes. They had been shot in the head except one, who was beheaded. All of them had been tortured," said a statement from the ministry of defense.
Two more corpses were found in a tributary to the river, police said.
Elsewhere, nine more "suspected terrorists" were picked up the northern city of Mosul and two in Samarra, one of them a Sudanese national.
Unidentified gunmen killed Colonel Mahjub Khalaf al-Jiburi, commander of a unit set up to protect Iraq's northern oilfields, in an ambush on his convoy as it passed near Tikrit, police said.
An "insurgent" was killed in Madaen, south of Baghdad, when his roadside bomb exploded prematurely, the Iraqi defense ministry said.
