TIKRIT, Iraq (AP) – Two U.S. soldiers who vanished during an insurgent checkpoint attack and were later found slain had been left alone while other vehicles in their patrol inspected traffic, the military said Thursday.

Previously, a witness had said insurgents managed to separate the three-Humvee convoy by opening fire and forcing two of the vehicles to give chase. Those reports now appear to be wrong, said Lt. Col. Michelle Martin-Hing, spokeswoman for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.

The two soldiers – believed to have been kidnapped by insurgents before their mutilated bodies were found this week – and a third soldier killed during the attack had been alone with one Humvee to guard a hydraulic bridge at a Euphrates River canal south of Baghdad.

When the attack occurred, others in the unit could not see the vehicle and were checking on their colleagues by radio, Martin-Hing said.

She said why the three-man team was left would be the focus of an investigation into the checkpoint attack. Army protocols are designed to prevent such attacks.

“The investigation is going to look at whether proper procedures were followed,” Martin-Hing told The Associated Press.

The soldiers’ bodies were recovered Tuesday after an exhaustive search involving some 8,000 American and Iraqi forces near an electrical plant in Youssifiyah, just miles from the attack scene. Youssifiyah is 12 miles south of Baghdad.

The U.S. military said Wednesday that one and possibly both of the soldiers were tortured and beheaded, and their bodies were sent to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for DNA testing.

Meanwhile, at least 25 people have been executed gangland-style in Iraq’s third-largest city this week, with residents gunned down in ones and twos and bodies found scattered throughout Mosul. Elsewhere, five U.S. troops were killed in operations south and west of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Thursday, and police stormed a farm and freed 17 victims of a factory kidnapping.

Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, has a mixed Kurdish and Sunni Arab population and a tradition of bad blood. The Kurds, who are largely Sunni Muslim but not Arab, have formed a prosperous autonomous region nearby after decades of oppression and mass killings under the Sunni Arab minority that ran Iraq until Saddam Hussein was ousted three years ago.

Police said they were not sure if the attacks were carried out by the Sunni Arab-led insurgency, common criminals or sectarian death squads. Increasing numbers of Iraqi deaths over the past months have been attributed to revenge killings carried out by Shiite-backed militia organizations or Sunni Arabs who have banded together in retribution.

The outburst of killings was first reported Tuesday morning when police found the bodies of a husband and wife – both Kurds – shot to death in eastern Mosul, according to police Capt. Ahmed Khalil. Before the day was out, 10 people were either killed in shootings or found dead.

The killings persisted Wednesday, with eight people – including a child and a college student – shot to death by nightfall. The violence continued Thursday, said police Brig. Abdel-Hamid Khalf, with a policeman killed in a firefight with gunmen early in the day and six civilians shot to death before sunset.

The police raid north of Baghdad that freed the 17 captives came a day after the mass kidnapping, believed to have been organized by Sunni extremists at the close of a factory shift.

Initial reports said as many as 85 people, including women who had taken their children to work, were initially taken.

But Industry Minister Fowzi Hariri told state-run Iraqiya TV on Thursday that 64 people were abducted, two of whom were killed trying to escape. Thirty people, mainly women and children, were freed shortly after the kidnapping, leaving 15 still believed in captivity.

A National Security Ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters, told the AP that several insurgents holding the kidnap victims were captured during the raid.

Police raided the farm on a tip from a kidnap victim who said he was freed after showing his captors a fake ID with a Sunni tribal family name.

“As we were leaving the factory we were stopped by gunmen. They got on our buses and told us to put our heads down. Then they took us to a poultry farm,” said the man who was released. He refused to allow use of his name, fearing retribution.

“One of the gunmen told us to stand in one line and then asked the Sunnis to get out of the line. That’s what I did. They asked me to prove that I am a Sunni, so I showed the forged ID and three others did the same. They released us,” the man said.

The workers were grabbed as they boarded company buses for the trip home after work at the al-Nasr General Complex, a former military plant that now makes metal doors, windows and pipes. The plant is about 20 miles north of the capital.

There has been rampant sectarian violence in the region, where tit-for-tat kidnappings and revenge killings are common, but nothing on the scale of Wednesday’s abduction. The al-Nasr plant is between Baghdad and Taji, a predominantly Sunni Arab area.

—

Ryan Lenz is embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Tikrit, Iraq. AP reporter Steven R. Hurst contributed to this story from Baghdad.

AP-ES-06-22-06 1735EDT

Copy the Story Link