Note: see especially the London Times account below...(Toronto Star/NYT): Questions linger over death of al-Zarqawi
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1149976210315&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724Head appeared intact after pulverizing blast
Jun. 11, 2006. 01:00 AM
DEXTER FILKINS AND JOHN F. BURNS
NEW YORK TIMES
HIBHIB, Iraq—The two 230-kilogram bombs that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi pulverized the brick house where he spent his final minutes, vaporizing walls and the foundation, hurling concrete blocks 90 metres into the weeds and blasting a crater 12 metres wide and deep.
"A big hole, sir," said Sgt.-Major Gary Rimpley, 46, of Penrose, Colo., who reached the scene about 90 minutes after the bombs fell.
Yesterday, three days after the air strike that ended the life of Iraq's most feared terrorist leader, the scene here was a bit tidier than in those first minutes after the attack: the bodies of the six people, including a child, who U.S. officers say died in the strike, were gone. The most useful bits of intelligence had been carted away. The once-gaping crater was reduced by bulldozer to a ditch.
Still, given the extraordinary destruction evident at the house, a number of questions lingered, including how anyone could have survived such an attack, even for a few minutes, as U.S. and Iraqi officials say al-Zarqawi did. It seemed puzzling, too, surveying the destruction, how al-Zarqawi's head and upper body, shown on television screens across the world, could have remained largely intact.
With rumours circulating in the Iraqi media that al-Zarqawi had begun to run from the house as the first bomb struck, U.S. officials said two military pathologists had arrived in Iraq to perform an autopsy to determine the precise cause of his death.
One Iraqi witness has come forward and told reporters a man resembling al-Zarqawi was pulled from an ambulance by U.S. troops and beaten before he died. For now, whatever clues remained of al-Zarqawi's violent life lay in the rubble of the house in Hibhib, about 50 kilometres north of Baghdad.
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(Mumbai DNAindia/AFP): 'Zarqawi could have been beaten to death by US forces'
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1034798AFP
Sunday, June 11, 2006 17:37 IST
LONDON: The leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, may have have been beaten to death by US forces following the air strike on his safe house, two British newspapers claimed on Sunday.
The Observer and the Sunday Times both carried reports on events leading up to his death, citing apparent eye-witnesses to the immediate aftermath of the attack near the city of Baquba on last Wednesday.
In a two-page report, The Observer said that although there was no corroboration of the claims that the badly-injured Zarqawi was beaten to death, revelations of revenge killings by US troops means it cannot be discounted.
It quoted one man as saying US soldiers pulled a man resembling Zarqawi from an ambulance where locals had placed him, wrapped his traditional Arab robe, the dishdasha, around his head and battered him severely till he died.
The Sunday Times went into more detail, citing 25-year-old labourer, Ali Abbas, as saying: "They (the US soldiers) were shouting and screaming and in a very tense and agitated mood".
He added: "The Americans tore his dishdasha and they kept on asking him through an interpreter, 'What is your name, what is your name?'."
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The Sunday Times June 11, 2006
How Iraq's ghost of death was corneredhttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2220222,00.htmlAmerica clocked up a rare victory in Iraq last week with the killing of al-Zarqawi. Can it maintain the momentum? Hala Jaber in Baghdad, Sarah Baxter in Washington and Michael Smith
He was still alive and moaning from an injury to his head when American helicopters and Humvees arrived at the scene. It had taken seven Iraqi men to drag him from the rubble minutes after the American air strike on the farmhouse where he was staying in the village of Hibhib.
They did not know then that the man they were trying to save was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the country's most wanted terrorist.
Ali Abbas, 25, a labourer, had just got home on Wednesday when, shortly after 6pm, the first of two huge blasts shook his house. He was only 300 yards from where the F-16 aircraft dropped two 500lb laser-guided bombs.
“It was so close I thought my uncle’s house next door had been attacked,” he said.
In the calm that followed, Abbas rushed out to help. He found his uncle unharmed, but as they looked across the fence they saw that the neighbouring house on the edge of a date palm grove was a smouldering wreck.
“We ran to it and started to look around for anything, but it had all been reduced to rubble,” he said. “We saw the bodies of two women that had been flung away from the blast. Both were dead. Another body was totally destroyed and in pieces, and then we heard a moan coming from another part of the house.”
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