Coffin bomb ends another macabre day in `new' Iraq First Edition

• Published in: Independent (London, England : 1986)
• Main Author: Robert Fisk in Baghdad
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Independent Digital News & Media 16.07.2004
• Subjects: Allawi, Iyad; Karim, Sabr
• ISSN: 0951-9467

A FEW hours before Lord Butler of Brockwell was attesting to the "good faith" of Tony Blair over the invasion of Iraq, Sabr [Sabr Karim] paid the price for working for "new Iraq". In Iraq, the funeral tent is traditionally pitched in the street outside the victim's home, but when I went to pay my respects yesterday it was blocked in by cars to prevent suicide bombers driving a vehicle into the tent - and not without reason. For when Sabr Karim's brother and son-in- law went to the family's mosque to collect a coffin for the dead man, someone had left a bomb inside. Another day in the life - and death - of "new Iraq". Sabr Karim's murder was only the beginning of the family's torment. His son-in-law, a vet who asked that his name not be published, described what happened next. "We went to the mosque to get a coffin for Sabr and we brought it home here and put him in it and took it to the mortuary to get the autopsy papers. Then we took the coffin back to the mosque and said we would want it the next day for the funeral. But when we returned to the mosque in the morning, we opened the lid and there was a bomb connected to a battery inside it." The bomb did not explode. US troops later investigated the incident - apparently concerned that someone might have been using coffins to store bombs which might later be used against American forces in Iraq - and later detained two of Sabr Karim's cousins, Fawzi and Hussein Abdal, as witnesses. They have still not been released from the al-Biyah police station - which has made the dead man's family even more concerned. "What are we to think?" [Yahyia] asked me in the funeral tent. "Do you people realise what hell we Iraqis are living through?"