Journalist says kin weren't slain

BAGHDAD – An Iraqi journalist who claimed Monday that gunmen had killed 11 family members in Baghdad recanted Friday, saying there had been no massacre and that the only person killed was a brother-in-law who died between Kut in the south and Baghdad.

Dhia al-Kawazz, who publishes a Web site from Amman, Jordan, said his initial claim – which was widely reported, including by McClatchy – was based on false information. Family members said he lied to get his family refugee status in Jordan.

Al-Kawazz's story has been challenged all week, first by the police, then the government and his own mother. The Iraqi police issued a warrant for al-Kawazz's arrest through Interpol for claiming that police had threatened his family's lives, according to Abdel Karim Khalaf, a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior.

Haider Sadiq, another brother-in-law of al-Kawazz's, said family members had learned of their apparent deaths through the news ticker on an Iraqi television station. "We were astonished by this, and neighbors started coming to ask us about what they saw on television," he said. "At that moment I decide to prove the truth, that we are alive."

Al-Kawazz charged Friday that he'd been misled by Sadiq – who first debunked his story – in order to discredit him as a journalist.

Al-Kawazz, who's lived outside Iraq for 20 years, runs a Web site that's critical of what he calls the Iranian and American "occupations," the Mahdi Army – the militia of radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr – and the Badr Organization.

Al-Kawazz claims that Sadiq is a member of the Badr Organization – the armed wing of the powerful Shiite Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council – and was involved in the killing of his other brother-in-law, who had fed information to his news site.

"I am sorry if this information was not true from the beginning, but I was misled by trustworthy sources from my family," al-Kawazz said. He published a new account of the story on his Web site that blames Sadiq for misleading him and alleges that Sadiq had a hand in his other brother-in-law's death.

Also Friday, Iraqi troops arrested the son of a leading Sunni politician and dozens of his associates after a car bomb was discovered near his compound and keys to the vehicle were found on one of his bodyguards, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

Five U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi civilian were injured when they detonated the car bomb near the compound of Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the biggest Sunni bloc in parliament, the U.S. military said. Al-Dulaimi's bloc, the Iraqi Accordance Front, accused Shiite-dominated security forces of "creating and marketing this crisis" to undermine U.S. efforts to organize Sunni tribes against al-Qaida.

About the writer:

• Leila Fadel is the Baghdad bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers. Dulaimy and Hussein are McClatchy special correspondents. The Associated Press contributed to this report.