Iraqi Confesses To Rape, Murder Of Journalist Atwar Bahjat

The man accused of murdering an Iraqi journalist has confessed to raping her before killing her, Al Arabiya reports.

TV presenter Atwar Bahjat was kidnapped in 2006 along with her cameraman Adnan Abdallah and sound engineer Khaled Mohsen while working for Al Arabiya in Iraq.

Yasser al-Takhi and his two brothers Mahmoud and Ghazwan confessed in a televised Iraqi army press conference after their arrest in southern Iraq, according to Al Arabiya.

Yasser al-Takhi said that he, his brothers and a driver, kidnapped the news team and drove them down a side street where Abdallah and Mohsen were shot and he raped and killed Bahjat.

AFP reports that Takhi was a member of the Iraqi group responsible for the 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq.

Al Arabiya's head of media, Nasser al-Sirami, thanked the Iraqi security forces for investigating the rape and murders.

247 media workers, many of whom were Iraqi, have been killed since the US invasion, AFP reports.

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Comments

[S1m0n]

I'm with the folks who find the televised confession unconvincing.

[okeefep1]

the pic is unnecessary though quite a tragedy.

[harriettubman]

Just horrible!!!

[humaneismyth]

I suppose this is supposed to excuse the rape and murder of Iraqis by US soldiers?

[Dunsmuir]

I believe, had she been American, her picture would not have been shown. Think about it.

[Freenation]

what a shame....

[davidwayneosedach]

Why come out with this information now - three years later?

[Joseph McKinney]

This smells to me it could me a like coerced false confession- the police don't seem to have any evidence other than the confessions, a tape the killers said they took of the incident seems to have gone missing (see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world/middleeast/05iraq.html?hpw), and the details of the incident don't jive with previous reports, which seem to indicate the attackers were not manning a checkpoint but rather arrived after a crowd waiting at a checkpoint around the jounalists had become somewhat hostile. Also the number of attackers and number of vehicles described in each account is different (see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article734427.ece).
I certainly wouldn't put it past the Iraqi government to come up with a quick fix for this terrible tragedy.

[deneufeldt]

How she died is terrible. The pic is unnecessary. I don't think Huff Post gets any points for this.

[JoeBlough]

If you hide it, it will happen again.

[Wyss]

Terrible and tragic. And brutal. The act I mean, not the picture. Of course the picture is also horrible, but hiding the picture seems to me like hiding your face in the sand. It may make you feel better, but it doesn't solve anything. If more faces were shown, perhaps we would feel more sympathy for the rights denied these innocent people.

[munki]

Yes! No right minded person will do such a horrific act!

[sandpiper1]

Were these people tortured into confessing for a crime they may or may not have committed? In Iraq, it's hard to tell in cases like these, so many innocents have been used as pawns.
RIP Atwar

[CR46]

I in seven women is raped during her lifetime in the USA, if this disgusts you please make a donation to your local sexual assault hotline program.

[comicpro]

Damn was the picture necessary?

[hippietilidie]

Agreed! She has family who don't deserve to see that. Dignity in death...

[wonkguy]

Yes it was. These were real crimes committed against real people. It is important to show that and not to just talk about a crime committed in a back alley thousands of miles away in a different time zone with faceless victims.

[KMan1]

RIP Atwar.

[Aabby]

Is that picture really necessary?

[Paros]

You are so right. That is so wrong. She was robbed of life, need we rob her of her dignity after life?

[Alarmist]

It most certainly is. I'm tired of people wanting to live in a rose-colored bubble, pretending that atrocities don't happen. Wanting to shield their precious eyes from photos of wounded and dead soldiers. That's how we wind up approving war, when we don't see the realities of it.

[waldopepper]

The pictured of the US Civil war helped to tell the world just what war is all about. Similarly, the first Televised war (Vietnam) helped people to understand what a was really is. Can't you see that showing people what horror looks like - can contribute to ending it?

If showing her demise helps prevent a similar fate to someone else, somewhere else - then she will not have died in vain.

[breakingpoint]

the only reason Bush and Cheney are free is because people haven't seen what their lies have caused

[gbrooks]

The truth is at first incredibly ugly and horrifying, if we can learn and get beyond it, truth is beauty.

[SharonaMonk]

Are they seriously showing a picture of this woman in that state? How insensitive! We've become so desensitized.

[Alarmist]

Otherwise how will we tackle it? Should Abu Ghraib photos not have been published? If not, we'd have a hard time believing it ever occured.

[breakingpoint]

your tax dollars paid for this and you allowed you leaders to get away with it

[PresidentRobertBooth]

No the picture is necessary.


Why cover up the shocking violence of the world.

People should face it.

[dogman44]

Seeing that image will keep what happened to Ms Bahjat vivid in peoples mind a lot
longer then a writen story that runs for one or two days and disappears.