U.S. orders new probe into Italian’s death

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Responding to growing pressure, American officials Tuesday ordered a second investigation into the U.S. military’s fatal shooting of an Italian government agent.

Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini discounted allegations that Friday’s killing of agent Nicola Calipari and the wounding of the freed hostage he was escorting were intentional. But Fini expressed doubts about the U.S. military’s version of the incident. He demanded that the American soldiers responsible be identified and that, if appropriate, “the guilty parties are punished.”

The Multi-National Force-Iraq, as the U.S.-led troops are officially called, said it had formed a second team to investigate the shooting of the Italians. An American brigadier general will lead the probe, the military said, and Italian officials are invited to participate. The new investigation, a follow-up to the initial inquiry by military officials, is expected to take three to four weeks.

The controversy, which threatens to cause the first major rift over Iraq between the Bush administration and the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, comes as U.S. forces are trying to turn more security operations over to Iraqi forces.

Despite training shortfalls and an assassination campaign by insurgents, Iraqi police and soldiers are assuming more checkpoints, patrols and counterinsurgency operations.

In a raid Tuesday in Latifiyah, south of Baghdad, Iraqi forces found the corpses of 15 beheaded men and women at a defunct military base. The troops were acting on intelligence that insurgents were using the Hatin base to plot attacks and imprison hostages, Iraqi officials said. They were also investigating the disappearances of several Shiite Muslim pilgrims who were on the way to the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

The mostly Sunni Muslim guerrillas have killed hundreds of travelers in and around Latifiyah, about 30 miles south of Baghdad. Many of the victims have been average Shiites, slain in what U.S. and Iraqi officials portray as an effort to spark a civil war among Iraq’s Sunnis, Shiites and ethnic Kurds.

The assassination campaign has also targeted Iraqi government officials. On Tuesday, gunmen fatally shot a top naturalization official from the Interior Ministry at his Baghdad home.

Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that has claimed hundreds of deadly attacks on civilian and military targets, said its gunmen had carried out the daylight slaying.

U.S. forces and insurgents also clashed in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. At least two people died, but it was unclear whether they were fighters or civilians. No U.S. soldiers were killed.

American officials are eager to have Iraqi forces take the lead on security, partly in hope that Iraqi troops can foster better relations with the citizenry. Many Iraqis accuse American forces at checkpoints and on patrols of being trigger-happy. U.S. soldiers have killed scores of Iraqi civilians in incidents that Iraqis contend are criminal but American officials say are justified as self-defense.

The self-defense issue will be a central one facing Brig. Gen. Peter Vangjel. He will head the investigation ordered into the slaying of Calipari and the wounding of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who was being taken to the airport after her release from a month in guerrilla captivity.

U.S. officials point out that the airport road is a dangerous one, full of guerrilla roadside bombings, ambushes and suicide attacks. They say the Italian car was speeding and refused to stop at a checkpoint.

But in a recounting of the incident Tuesday, Fini said the Italian car was going only about 25 mph and had not been ordered to stop. Sgrena, who along with a second Italian intelligence agent survived the shooting, denied that the Americans had warned the vehicle.

“It was certainly an accident,” Fini said in Rome. “But this doesn’t mean, in fact it makes it necessary, to demand that events are clarified. … The reconstruction we’ve made from the direct testimony of another agent doesn’t coincide completely with what the U.S. authorities have said.”

Fini also said the U.S. military command had authorized Calipari to travel to the airport. But speaking in Washington, the top U.S. general in Iraq said that if such clearance had been given, he was unaware of it.

Army Gen. George Casey also said officials were investigating whether a Bulgarian soldier killed last week was hit by U.S. gunfire.

“It’s another unfortunate incident,” Casey said. “Again, both the Bulgarians and us are looking into exactly what happened.”