KARBALA, Iraq: An Iraqi court yesterday condemned to death a senior leader of the Mehdi Army Shiite militia over a killing spree last year that left 52 people dead in the central shrine city of Kerbala.
The Kerbala appeals court sentenced Ali Sharia, the local chief of Moqtada Sadr’s militia wing, to death by hanging, a statement read out by the court said. “The evidence against the defendant was abundant,” said presiding Judge Abed Alnour Al-Fatlawi. “He also confessed to the crimes.”
Meanwhile, gunmen burst into the home of a local militia fighting Al-Qaeda in Iraq’s Diyala province before dawn yesterday and killed the man, his wife and two sons aged seven and 12, police said.
A police official said Al-Qaeda fighters were behind the ferocious early-morning bloodletting in the town of Ahbash east of the provincial capital Baquba.
Ahbash until recently was under the control of the jihadists but it is now held by a Sahwa, or Awakening, group, one of hundreds across Iraq comprising locals paid by the US military to take up arms against the jihadists.
The father had just joined the Sahwa group as a leader, police said. He was killed, along with his family, “by armed Al-Qaeda fighters who broke into his house in the early hours of the morning,” the police official said.
