AP Interview: Sunni Iraq official criticizes force

BAGHDAD (AP) — The Sunni head of a committee established to investigate deadly clashes that erupted at a protest camp in Iraq last week said Wednesday that he believes excessive force was used by security forces as they tried to make arrests among anti-government demonstrators.

The April 23 clashes in the town of Hawija, about 240 kilometers (150 miles) north of Baghdad, sparked a wave of violence across Iraq that has killed more than 230 people, posing the most serious threat to Iraq's stability since the last American troops left in December 2011.

Sectarian attacks and clashes have been on the upswing in Iraq, raising concerns of a return to the bloody fighting in the last decade that approached a state of civil war. Many from Iraq's Sunni minority say they are marginalized by and discriminated against by the Shiite-led government.

Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni, was named the head of a ministerial committee set up by Iraq's prime minister hours after the clashes broke out between government security forces and some of the protesters in Hawija.

"We have found that extra and extensive force was used, and it was not needed," he said in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Al-Mutlaq has in the past clashed with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose Shiite-led administration has been the target of more than four months of anti-government demonstrations. Al-Mutlaq continues to serve in the government, unlike several other senior Sunni officials who resigned in protest or were forced out of office.

The Defense Ministry said after the crackdown that 23 people, including three members of the security forces, were killed in the clashes.

Al-Mutlaq's office countered that investigators found evidence that 46 demonstrators, including minors, were killed. Several were shot in the chest or above, he said.

Al-Mutlaq said members of the military told investigators that Iraqi troops opened fire after one of their officers was killed. While he did not cast doubt on that account, he suggested that the military response was excessive.

"In any military, someone has to be responsible," he said. "To lose one soldier, or one officer, that does not mean that you kill such a huge amount of people," he added later.

Al-Mutlaq stopped short of assigning blame for the killings, saying it would likely be several weeks before his committee makes its full findings public, if at all.

The clashes in Hawija erupted four days after a checkpoint run by the police and army near the town came under attack. Militants seized a number of weapons before retreating into a crowd of protesters, according to the Defense Ministry.

The Defense Ministry said its forces tried to warn protesters to disperse before moving on the site, and they came under heavy fire as they tried to make arrests. It said some of the dead included militants tied to al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's outlawed Baath Party, and weapons were recovered from the scene.

Gen. Mohammed al-Askari, a Defense Ministry spokesman, denied that excessive force was used at the Hawija camp.

"We gave them three days in order to allow us to search for wanted suspects and weapons, but our request was turned down. When our security forces advanced, they were attacked," he said when asked for comment Wednesday evening.

While the circumstances of what exactly happened at Hawija remain murky, international observers also question how the incident was handled.

"This was clearly a major fight in which many people died — not all of them armed," said a Western diplomat, who was not authorized to speak publicly and agreed to talk only on condition of anonymity.

"Bottom line, it looks like excessive force was used and a lot of unarmed people were killed. There were more people killed than there were arms," the diplomat added in an interview this week.

In the wake of the Hawija incident, gunmen have battled security forces in a number of towns, and attackers have detonated bombs in both Sunni and Shiite areas.

The violence continued Wednesday. A series of attacks claimed 14 lives.

A parked car bomb went off early in the morning in the Shiite-dominated Baghdad suburb of Husseiniya, killing four civilians, police said. Twelve people were wounded.

Around noon, another parked car bomb exploded near a group of anti-al-Qaida Sunni fighters near the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, 65 kilometers (40 miles) west of Baghdad.

The pro-government militiamen had gathered outside a military post to receive their salaries. The explosion killed three fighters and one civilian, wounding 15, police said.

In the evening, gunmen in five pickup trucks attacked Tarmiyah police station, sparking a half-hour gunbattle. Six policemen were killed, including the police station chief, and 10 other policemen were wounded, according to police. The gunmen withdrew after security reinforcements entered the town, 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Baghdad.

Medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.

The violence that escalated after the Hawija clashes sharply raised Iraq's death toll last month. It hit 402 in April, according to an AP count, up from the previous month's toll of 254.

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Associated Press writers Sinan Salaheddin, Mohannad al-Saleh and Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this report.

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Kremlin criticizes U.S. blacklist ahead of Obama adviser visit

By Steve Gutterman

MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin's spokesman on Sunday called a U.S. law barring Russians from the country over alleged rights abuses unacceptable interference in Russia's affairs, setting a tough tone before a visit by a senior White House adviser.

Dmitry Peskov's remarks were the first comment from Putin's office after the U.S. administration named 18 Russians subject to visa bans and asset freezes over the Magnitsky Act legislation passed by Congress late last year.

Most of the 18 were blacklisted for alleged links to the prosecution of whistleblowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose death in a Moscow jail in 2009 has set off a chain of events that has damaged Russian-U.S. ties.

"This is direct interference in Russian affairs. The so-called 'Magnitsky case' should not be discussed outside Russia at all," state news agency Itar-Tass quoted Peskov as saying. "This is unacceptable to us, and we will never agree with it."

President Barack Obama had been obliged to release the U.S. list by Saturday under the Magnitsky Act, which drew attention to concerns about rights and the rule of law in Russia, which Putin has led since 2000 as president or prime minister.

Moscow responded on Saturday by naming 18 Americans barred from Russia under retaliatory legislation Putin signed in December, most of them accused of violating the rights of Russians prosecuted in the United States.

Peskov blamed the United States for the exchange and said it could draw the attention of the two nuclear-armed countries away from issues of global security that are more important.

"At a time when international and regional conflicts dictate rapprochement between Russia and the United States, because the two countries are in many ways responsible for the situation in the world, actions are being taken that not only cast a shadow but inflict harm on relations between these countries," he said.

The blacklists added to tension before a visit by Obama's national security adviser Tom Donilon, whose talks with senior Russian officials on Monday will be the highest-level face-to-face contacts between the Kremlin and the White House since Obama started his second term in January.

But despite the rhetoric, both governments kept high-level current officials off their lists in an apparent effort to contain the political damage.

Peskov made clear on Friday that the relationship would not be ruined, saying ties were multifaceted and there remained "many prospects for development and growth".

Donilon's talks are expected to include discussion of U.S. plans for a European anti-missile shield, which have strained relations because Russia says the system could eventually shoot down its nuclear missiles and threaten its security.

A U.S. decision to scale down its plans could ease those concerns, but Moscow's response so far has been cautious.

(Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

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Egypt's pope sharply criticizes president

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's Coptic Christian pope delivered an unprecedented direct criticism of the Islamist president Tuesday after a mob attack on the church's main cathedral, saying he had failed to protect the building and warning that the country is collapsing.

The comments by Pope Tawadros II and the cathedral attack itself illustrate a new reality in Egypt, where institutions long seen as above the fray are being dragged into the country's intense polarization and political violence.

Egypt has become increasingly divided between two camps, with President Mohammed Morsi and Islamist allies on one side and an opposition made up of moderate Muslims, Christians and liberals on the other, a schism essentially over the country's political future after decades of dictatorship. Opponents accuse Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood of seeking to monopolize power, while Morsi's allies say the opposition is trying to destabilize the country to derail the elected leadership.

Traditionally, a number of state icons were considered untouchable politically — nationalist pillars vital for the state's stability and so too important to be criticized or mired in disputes. But one by one, they have been sucked into the country's divisions, whether under pressure to take sides or outright plunged into controversy.

The military was pulled into politics early on when it took power following the February 2011 ouster of autocrat Hosni Mubarak and ruled for nearly 17 months. The courts became the center of controversy last year, with repeated confrontations between Morsi's administration and members of the judiciary.

Now, not only the Coptic Church but also the country's most eminent Islamic institution, Al-Azhar, are getting caught up in the turmoil.

Tawadros' remarks Tuesday in a telephone interview with the private ONTV network were his first direct criticism of Morsi since he was enthroned in November as the spiritual leader of Egypt's Orthodox Coptic Christians. Christians make up an estimated 10 percent of Egypt's 90 million people.

Tawadros said Morsi had promised him in a telephone conversation to do everything to protect the St Mark Cathedral, which also serves as the papal seat.

"But in reality he did not," Tawadros said. When asked to explain, he said: It "comes under the category of negligence and poor assessment of events." He did not make clear whether he was accusing Morsi himself of negligence or whether he was addressing the president's government.

In violence Sunday, an angry mob of Muslims threw firebombs and rocks at the Coptic cathedral in Cairo, leaving two people dead. One of the two was identified as a Christian.

The attack followed a funeral service for four Christians killed in sectarian clashes in a town north of Cairo, which also left a Muslim dead, the deadliest sectarian violence since Morsi came to office as Egypt's first freely elected president.

Tawadros warned, "This is a society that is collapsing. Society is collapsing every day."

"The church has been a national symbol for 2,000 years," he said. "It has not been subjected to anything like this even during the darkest ages ... There has been no positive and clear action from the state, but there is a God. The church does not ask for anyone's protection, only from God."

Morsi strongly condemned the recent violence and said that he considered any attack on the cathedral to be an attack on him personally. He also ordered an investigation into the violence and revived a state body called the National Council for Justice and Equality mandated to promote equality between Egyptians regardless of their religious and ethnic background.

On Tuesday, four of his top aides visited the cathedral to offer their condolences for the victims of the violence.

A presidential statement issued late Tuesday reasserted Morsi's commitment to protect the Coptic church and to bring to justice those behind the violence. It described the president's order to revive the council as a "serious initial step."

Also in an earlier statement, the office of Morsi's assistant for foreign relations underlined that the presidency rejects violence "in all forms and under any pretext" and that "all Egyptians are citizens who should enjoy all rights and are equal before the law." It said the presidency has ordered authorities to "to exert their utmost efforts to contain the situation and protect the lives and property of citizens."

Speaking to reporters in Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell urged Morsi to make good on his promise of a full investigation and to make public the findings.

"The failure to prosecute perpetrators of sectarian crimes has contributed to an environment of impunity in Egypt, and so we are concerned," he said.

Still, Tawadros was critical of the promises of investigation and the revival of the justice and equality body. "Enough already of formations, committees and groups and whatever else," he said. "We want action not words and, let me say this, there are many names and committees but there is no action on the ground."

Long before the weekend's deadly sectarian violence, Tawadros has gone on record saying he was unhappy with the Islamist-backed constitution that was rushed to passage in a referendum in December.

But his criticism Tuesday was a powerful departure from the church's longstanding policy of avoiding confrontations with the government of the day. Pointedly, Tawadros added his praise of the sheik of Al-Azhar — another institution struggling to stay immune from the country's political battles — saying the sheik was the first to call him and express support amid Sunday's violence.

Al-Azhar, the centuries-old seat of Sunni Muslim learning, was hit by the turmoil last week. Students from Al-Azhar University stormed the office of the sheik of Al-Azhar, Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb, angry over a case of food poisoning in the university that sickened dozens. El-Tayeb was forced to remove the university's president.

Some Al-Azhar clerics and opponents of Islamists charged that the Muslim Brotherhood was behind the protests, trying to embarrass el-Tayeb. Some in Al-Azhar, which is touted as a center for religious moderation, believe the Brotherhood or more hardline Islamists want to replace el-Tayeb to install one of their own in the post.

In an interview with ONTV this week, an aide to el-Tayeb, Mahmoud Azab, suggested the protest seemed "politicized," adding, "We hope that is not the case... We hope that the path of Al-Azhar toward unifying the Egyptian people will not be obstructed" — though he later issued a statement insisting his comments were not directed at any group.

In a statement Saturday, the Brotherhood denied any role in the protest, blaming "counter-revolution forces who control certain media outlets" for spreading the idea to create tensions between the group and el-Tayeb.

"Our relationship is good, and our respect for the institution of Al-Azhar and its imam is immense," it said.

But the questions swirling around so many institutions at once have fueled the sense of instability among many Egyptians, on top of the country's mounting economic woes and the struggle to end lawlessness on the streets that has been pervasive since Mubarak's fall.

Some of Morsi's opponents have called on the military to step back in to a direct role in politics. The generals have said nothing publicly on such calls, but its leaders have made it clear on several occasions they were the ultimate guarantors of the nation's stability and would not hesitate to intervene if things go out of control.

Morsi's tussles with the judiciary — including a recent court order annulling his installation of a new top prosecutor late last year — have deeply divided the country. Opponents accuse Morsi of trying to undermine the courts, a claim the presidency denies, while Morsi supporters often depict some in the judiciary as counter-revolutionaries trying to stop his agenda.

In its statement Saturday, the Brotherhood blasted what it called "libel, slander and misinformation" that it said were aimed at causing divisions between the group and the military or judiciary.

"We have great faith in the wisdom of Egypt's national and religious institutions, and that they cannot be fooled by counter-revolutionary conspiracies that plot against the homeland and the people who have known the Brotherhood for decades," it said.

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AP correspondent Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

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Vatican criticizes campaign against pope

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The honeymoon that Pope Francis has enjoyed since his remarkable election hit a bump Friday, with the Vatican lashing out at what it called a defamatory and "anti-clerical left-wing" media campaign questioning his actions during Argentina's murderous military dictatorship.

On Day 2 of the Francis pontificate, the Vatican denounced news reports in Argentina and beyond resurrecting allegations that the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio failed to openly confront the junta responsible for kidnapping and killing thousands of people in a "dirty war" to eliminate leftist opponents.

Bergoglio, like most Argentines, didn't publicly confront the dictators who ruled from 1976-83, while he was the leader of the country's Jesuits. And human rights activists differ on how much blame he personally deserves.

Top church leaders had endorsed the junta and some priests even worked alongside torturers inside secret prisons. Nobody has produced any evidence suggesting Bergoglio had anything to do with such crimes. But many activists are angry that as archbishop of Buenos Aires for more than a decade, he didn't do more to support investigations into the atrocities.

On Thursday, the old ghosts resurfaced.

A group of 44 former military and police officers on trial for torture, rape and murder in a concentration camp in Cordoba province in the 1970s wore the yellow-and-white ribbons of the papal flag in Francis' honor. Many Argentine newspapers ran the photo Friday.

The Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi noted that Argentine courts had never accused Bergoglio of any crime, that he had denied all accusations against him and that on the contrary "there have been many declarations demonstrating how much Bergoglio did to protect many persons at the time."

He said the accusations against the new pope were made long ago "by anti-clerical left-wing elements to attack the church. They must be firmly rejected."

The harsh denunciation was typical of a Vatican that often reacts defensively when it feels under attack, even though its response served to give the story legs for another day.

It interrupted the generally positive reception Francis has enjoyed since his election as pope on Wednesday, when even his choice of footwear — his old black shoes rather than the typical papal red — was noted as a sign of his simplicity and humility.

There was one clearly unscripted moment Friday, when the 76-year-old Francis stumbled briefly during an audience with the cardinals, but he quickly recovered. And for the second day in a row, Francis slipped out of the Vatican walls, this time to visit an ailing Argentine cardinal, Jorge Mejia, who suffered a heart attack Wednesday and was in the hospital.

This upbeat narrative of a people's pope who named himself after the nature-loving St. Francis of Assisi has clashed with accusations stemming from Bergoglio's past.

The worst allegation is that as the military junta took over in 1976, he withdrew support for two Jesuit priests whose work in the slums of Buenos Aires had put them in direct contact with the leftist guerrilla movement advocating armed revolution. The priests were then kidnapped and interrogated inside a clandestine torture center at the Navy Mechanics School.

Bergoglio said he had told the priests — Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics — to give up their slum work for their own safety, and they refused. Yorio later accused Bergoglio of effectively delivering them to the death squads by declining to publicly endorse their work. Yorio died in Uruguay in 2000.

Jalics, who had maintained silence about the events, issued a statement Friday saying he spoke with Bergoglio years later and the two celebrated Mass together and hugged "solemnly."

"I am reconciled to the events and consider the matter to be closed," he said.

Bergoglio told his official biographer, Sergio Rubin, in 2010, that he had gone to extraordinary, behind-the-scenes lengths to save the men.

The Jesuit leader persuaded the family priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to call in sick so Bergoglio could say Mass instead and take the opportunity to successfully appeal for their release, Rubin wrote.

Lombardi said the airing of the accusations following Francis' election was "characterized by a campaign that's often slanderous and defamatory."

Earlier this week, Lombardi issued a similar denunciation of an advocacy group for victims of sexual abuse, accusing it of using the media spotlight on the conclave to try to publicize old accusations against cardinals. The accusations, Lombardi said, are baseless and the cardinals deserve everyone's "esteem."

The accusations against Bergoglio were fanned by Horacio Verbitzky, an investigative journalist who was a leftist militant in the 1970s and is now closely aligned with the government. He has written extensively about the accusations in Argentina's Pagina12 newspaper, a left-wing daily known for advocacy journalism.

Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for documenting the junta's atrocities, said this week that "Bergoglio was no accomplice of the dictatorship."

"Perhaps he didn't have the courage of other priests, but he never collaborated with the dictatorship," Esquivel said on Buenos Aires' Radio de la Red.

Argentine political analyst Ignacio Fidanza concurred.

"What they're demanding is that during the dictatorship he should have planted himself in the Plaza de Mayo and shouted against it," he told The Associated Press. "It was probably more effective to speak in silence, since it was an extreme situation."

Human rights investigators in Argentina have been unable to make any other cases against Bergoglio from the junta years, other than the allegations concerning the two Jesuits and that he failed to help a family find their murdered daughter's illegally adopted baby.

But activists are also angry that as leader of the Argentine church, he has never acknowledged or apologized for what they describe as the church's active institutional support of the military government, said Gaston Chillier, who tracks the country's human rights cases as director of the Center for Legal and Social Studies.

The church was so deeply in league with the dictators that when the Inter-American Human Rights Commission came for an inspection in 1979, the Argentine navy moved many detainees to an island owned by the diocese during the visit.

"He is responsible during Argentina's period of democracy for continuing a cover-up," Chillier told the AP. "His knowledge of these cases clearly shows that he cannot deny the torture and the systematic theft of babies."

Bergoglio testified in 2010 that he didn't know anything about baby thefts until well after the dictatorship.

Since Bergoglio became archbishop in 1998, his church has issued several apologies for failing to do more to protect people from violence that came from both the right and the left. The latest, in October 2012, was the most forceful, and it also, for the first time, asked Catholics to come forward with whatever evidence they may have to support Argentina's human rights trials.

But Chillier says Bergoglio could have done more to make the church help identify children and the bodies of detainees as well as identify those responsible for atrocities.

"It's one thing to acknowledge what you failed to do, but another entirely to apologize for what you actually did," Chillier said.

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Warren and Almudena Calatrava contributed from Buenos Aires. David Rising in Berlin contributed.

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Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

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Libyan mufti criticizes UN document on women

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — Libya's supreme religious cleric is calling on Muslim nations to reject a United Nations document on women's rights, saying that it counters Islamic law.

Mufti al-Sadiq al-Ghiryani issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against the document set to be signed by nations at the 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women this month.

While Islamic jurisprudence prefers witnesses for a divorce, the mufti says the U.N. document insists on judicial interference.

The edict issued Monday criticizes the document's references to inheritance and its equating of men and women. Al-Ghiryani says this puts full burden on women to share equally in terms of domestic spending.

The mufti also condemns the document's wording on sexual freedoms and the rights of children born out of wedlock.

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