SA citizen shot dead in Iraq - total 3 coalition contractors

[dArKeR]

Kirkuk - Gunmen killed a South African, a New Zealander and an Iraqi in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Monday, a police official said.

Gunmen opened fire with AK-47 rifles in a drive-by shooting on the victims' vehicle as they were leaving their residence in Kirkuk, 250km north of Baghdad.

The South African and Iraqi were killed during the shooting and the New Zealander later died of his wounds.

The foreigners were engineers and the Iraqi was their driver, the official said.

http://iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=3&art_id=qw1084184462949B262&set_id=1

[seemslikeadream]

1. Apartheid Enforcers Guard Iraq For the U.S.

By Marc Perelman
February 20, 2004

In its effort to relieve overstretched U.S. troops in Iraq, the Bush administration has hired a private security company staffed with former henchmen of South Africa’s apartheid regime.
The reliance on apartheid enforcers was highlighted by an attack in Iraq last month that killed one South African security officer and wounded another who worked for the subsidiary of a firm called Erinys International. Both men once served in South African paramilitary units dedicated to the violent repression of apartheid opponents.
François Strydom, who was killed in the January 28 bombing of a hotel in Baghdad, was a former member of the Koevoet, a notoriously brutal counterinsurgency arm of the South African military that operated in Namibia during the neighboring state’s fight for independence in the 1980s. His colleague Deon Gouws, who was injured in the attack, is a former officer of the Vlakplaas, a secret police unit in South Africa.
“It is just a horrible thought that such people are working for the Americans in Iraq,” said Richard Goldstone, a recently retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
The Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and the Pentagon did not return requests for comment.
In Iraq, the U.S. government has tapped into the ever-growing pool of private security companies to provide a variety of defense services, including protecting oil sites and training Iraqi forces. Observers worry that a reliance on these companies and the resulting lack of accountability is a recipe for further problems in a volatile region.


http://www.forward.com/main/article.php?ref=perelman20040218608