US:The US and Iraqi governments were yesterday planning to announce a joint investigation into Sunday's shooting of eight civilians in Baghdad that led to the suspension of the private US security firm Blackwater.
The inquiry offers a face-saving way out of an awkward standoff between the two governments. The US, which heavily relies on Blackwater for protection of its diplomatic staff and other western workers, was forced for a second consecutive day to order all state department employees not to venture outside the relative safety of Baghdad's fortified Green Zone other than by helicopter.
The Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki yesterday urged the US to stop using Blackwater and transfer the work to other firms. "We will not allow Iraqis to be killed in cold blood . . . what happened was a crime," he told a news conference in Baghdad.
He disputed the Blackwater version of the shooting.
"It is in our interests to freeze the work of this company and the embassy can travel with other companies," Mr al-Maliki said.
Blackwater is the biggest of three private security firms employed by the state department. Private security staff involved in controversial incidents are often hastily withdrawn but a US embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Natongo said those involved were still in Iraq.
The proposed US-Iraqi inquiry comes amid conflicting accounts about what happened on Sunday. Blackwater said its employees had acted "lawfully and appropriately" after coming under attack. But the Iraqi government insisted Blackwater had opened fire on innocent civilians.
The deputy press secretary at the US state department, Tom Casey, said: "we're in conversations with the Iraqis on how we can find some mechanisms for looking at this issue in a joint way. There have been a number of questions that have been raised and we want to make sure that both we and the Iraqis have a common set of facts that we're working from." The US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said she wanted to "work with the Iraqi government to make certain that this sort of thing doesn't happen".