Iraqi reporter is killed; CBS journalists remain missing

BAGHDAD —  The bullet-riddled body of an Iraqi newspaper reporter was recovered Tuesday in Baghdad, and police in the southern city of Basra began an intensive search for a Western journalist working for CBS News and his Iraqi interpreter.

Journalists have been frequent targets in Iraq, which the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said remained the world’s most deadly country for media workers despite recent security gains.

The slain Iraqi journalist was identified as Hisham Muchawat Hamdan, a member of Iraq’s Young Journalists League who reported for three local newspapers.

Police and colleagues said the 27-year-old father of two disappeared Sunday on his way to the league’s offices in downtown Baghdad. His body was delivered to the city’s main morgue without identification, so officials did not know who he was until relatives turned up looking for him.

The grisly discovery came on the same day as dozens of lawmakers walked out of Iraq’s parliament, thwarting the latest attempt to pass a national budget and other laws. The standoff underscored the suspicion that remains between the country’s major ethnic and religious factions, an obstacle to the kinds of power-sharing arrangements that U.S. officials think are key to long-term stability.

In Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, where rival Shiite Muslim militias have been vying for control, police cordoned off the Sultan Palace Hotel, where the two CBS journalists were taken away in armored vehicles Sunday.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility. But Maj. Gen. Abdul-Kareem Khalaf, a spokesman for Iraq’s Interior Ministry, said investigators had identified the “gang” holding the journalists and thought it had received help from police. “One of those accused is from the police,” Khalaf said in Baghdad.

CBS News confirmed Monday that two of its journalists were missing but asked that they not be identified.

Followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr distanced themselves Tuesday from the journalists’ disappearance and called for their immediate release. Muhannad Hashimi, a Sadr representative in Basra, said his movement’s dispute was with “the occupation forces and not with civilian foreigners, especially journalists.”

At least 15 other journalists, all of them Iraqis, are being held hostage, Reporters Without Borders said in a statement Tuesday. “Yet again it is journalists who are paying dearly for the chronic insecurity in one of the country’s biggest cities,” the group said, referring to the Basra abduction.

At least 126 other journalists, most of them Iraqis, have been killed since U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

The U.S. military has reported a 60% drop in violence since it completed a buildup of 28,500 additional troops over the summer. But U.S. officials worry that Iraqi political leaders are not making the tough compromises needed for long-term security as American forces draw down to their pre-”surge” level of about 130,000 troops in the coming months.

Iraqi lawmakers have been arguing for weeks about the national budget, an amnesty bill and legislation governing the distribution of power between the central government and provincial authorities.

In a bid to break the deadlock, the main blocs representing the country’s majority Shiite groups, their Kurdish allies and the Sunni Arab minority agreed to approve the three pieces of legislation as a package in a rare night session Tuesday. But squabbling broke out over the order in which the bills should be voted on.

Mahmoud Mashhadani, the outspoken Sunni speaker of parliament, wanted to begin with the amnesty bill, which could allow for the release of thousands of mostly Sunni detainees. The measure aims to mollify the main Sunni alliance, which pulled its six ministers out of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s Cabinet last year.

But Kurdish lawmakers, fearing that many parliament members would leave the meeting once they had the bill they wanted, demanded that the budget be considered first. Some Sunni and Shiite politicians have opposed the allocation of 17% of the budget to the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north, arguing that it no longer represented that much of the population. Many walked out Tuesday after the Kurds made their demands, and no vote took place.

In frustration, Mashhadani talked of his disbanding parliament if its members could not reach agreement. But lawmakers said it was a toothless threat because Iraq’s constitution stipulates that the speaker can only dissolve the legislature if a majority of the body votes to do so.

In other developments, a morgue official in Baqubah said a grave containing 13 bodies was discovered near Muqdadiya, about 30 miles northeast of the Diyala provincial capital. The victims, who appeared to have been killed months ago, were found handcuffed and shot in the head, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. He said some showed signs of torture.

Similar graves have been found in the area northeast of Baghdad, which until recently was under the sway of Sunni militants. But the U.S. military, which has launched a campaign to dislodge the insurgents, said it had no reports to substantiate the claim.

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

Times staff writer Saif Hameed in Baghdad and special correspondents in Baghdad and Basra contributed to this report.