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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Anchor for U.S-funded TV station found dead


A firefighter shields his face from the heat of a blazing oil pipeline in Dibis in the northern Kurdish area of Iraq on Saturday after saboteurs blew it up.
 (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Patrick Quinn Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A major oil fire raged Saturday after insurgents blew up a pipeline in the north of the country, and the family of an anchorwoman for a U.S.-funded state television station – a mother of four who was repeatedly shot in the head – found her body dumped on a street in the northern city of Mosul.

Insurgents, meanwhile, killed two civilians in a roadside bombing west of Baghdad; a suicide car bomber killed an Iraqi national guardsman and injured seven people southwest of the capital; and the U.S. military announced the death Friday of an American soldier killed in a massive security sweep in the Sunni Triangle.

As part of the offensive, residents in Ramadi, a Sunni-dominated city 70 miles west of Baghdad, reported clashes between insurgents and U.S. forces, but the military provided no details. U.S. troops have been conducting an offensive in the region for nearly a week.

The U.S. military said an insurgent was killed and another was injured while trying to build a bomb in an abandoned house in Tirkit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown and the site of a Thursday suicide bombing that killed 15 Iraqi police.

The body of Raiedah Mohammed Wageh Wazan, a 35-year-old news presenter for U.S.-funded Nineveh TV, was found dumped along a Mosul street six days after she was kidnapped by masked gunmen, according to her husband, who said she had been shot four times in the head.

“This is a criminal act. She was an innocent woman who did not hurt anybody in all her life. I asked her several times to quit for the sake of her safety, but she refused,” said husband Salim Saad-Allah.

The mother of three boys and a girl had been threatened with death several times by insurgents who demanded she quit her job, Saad-Allah said. The U.S. military confirmed insurgents had threatened station employees.

It was unclear what prompted the kidnapping, but Nineveh TV was attacked last week with mortar rounds that wounded three technicians. An Arabic-language Internet bulletin board recently carried a statement from al Qaeda In Iraq claiming responsibility for the mortar strike.

Attackers hit the oil pipeline late Friday, setting fire to the line running about 20 miles from fields in Dibis to Kirkuk, which is 150 miles north of Baghdad. As the fire continued to rage Saturday night, an official with the state-run North Oil Co. said it would take at least four days to repair the line.

Insurgents have regularly targeted Iraq’s oil infrastructure, cutting exports and denying the country funds badly needed for reconstruction. Three pipelines were been blown up last week.

Acts of sabotage have blocked exports to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, a major outlet for Iraqi crude, for nearly two weeks.

Meanwhile, political activity continued Saturday as Shiite political dissenters switched course and rallied behind the prime minister candidacy of conservative Islamic Dawa party leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari. The change of heart apparently was linked to Friday’s endorsement of al-Jaafari by Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s most powerful Shiite cleric.

The council complained that the clergy-backed alliance, which won 140 seats in Iraq’s landmark Jan. 30 elections, had forced the withdrawal of the man they were backing for premier – the secular Shiite Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon favorite to run a post-Saddam Iraq before he fell out with the Bush administration, which accused him of passing secrets to Iran.