Contractor Burned Alive in Iraq

Sunday, October 23, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq - An angry mob of insurgents attacked a convoy of American contractors last month when they got lost in a town north of Baghdad, killing four and wounding two, the U.S. military said on Sunday.

The Sept. 20 attack in the mostly Sunni Arab town of Duluiyah, about 45 miles north of Baghdad, was reported for the first time on Saturday by the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph and confirmed by the military on Sunday.

The convoy, which included U.S. military guards riding in Humvees, made a wrong turn into Duluiyah and insurgents opened fire with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, Maj. Richard Goldenberg, a spokesman for Task Force Liberty in north-central Iraq, told The Associated Press. ...

The Telegraph reported the contractors killed and wounded were employees of the Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, the biggest U.S. military contractor in Iraq. But Goldenberg could not confirm that.

The Telegraph reported that two of the contractors not killed in the initial attack were dragged alive from their vehicle, which had been badly shot up. They were forced to kneel in the road before being killed.

“Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight,” the paper reported. “Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man’s body to stoke the flames.”
The crowd then “dragged their corpses through the street, chanting anti-U.S. slogans,” the report said.