freedetainees.org

BAGHDAD: Iraqi officials said Monday that the police had arrested a man suspected of being a top figure in Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia in the northern city of Mosul, where security forces have been carrying out a crackdown to root out the terror network.

The U.S. military said it was looking into the report. Reports of high-level Qaeda arrests in the past have sometimes proved incorrect.

Major General Ahmed Taha of the Iraqi Interior Ministry identified the detainee as the “wali” - or “governor” - of the militant group in Mosul.

But a security official involved in the detention said officials were still interrogating the detainee, Abdul-Khaliq al-Sabawi, to confirm whether he was the Mosul wali. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

U.S.-backed Iraqi forces have been carrying out raids on suspected militants in Mosul - and so far the sweep has seen almost no clashes, a sign insurgents are seeking to lay low or escape. The Defense Ministry reported the first death in the crackdown, saying raids Monday left one militant dead, along with 78 people arrested. The ministry statement gave no details on how the death occurred.

Also Monday, Iraq’s largest Sunni Arab party said it rejected an apology made by the U.S. military after an American sniper used a Koran for target practice. The unidentified soldier was disciplined and removed from Iraq, the military said Sunday.

The Iraqi Islamic Party called the shooting of Islam’s holy book a “flagrant assault on Muslim sacraments” and that the “apology alone” was not enough. It said the U.S. military should impose the “severest punishment” on the soldier.

The Koran, with 14 bullet holes and graffiti marked on its pages, was found May 11 by Iraqis near a former base outside the town of Radwaniyah, west of Baghdad.

On Saturday, the top U.S. commander held a formal ceremony apologizing to Radwaniyah’s Sunni tribal leaders, vowing the act would not be repeated.

U.S. detains juveniles in IraqWashington has told the United Nations that the U.S. military is holding more than 500 juveniles suspected of being “unlawful enemy combatants” in detention centers in Iraq and has about 10 detained at the U.S. base at Bagram, Afghanistan, The Associated Press reported from New York.

Since 2002, 2,500 youths under the age of 18 have been detained, almost all in Iraq, for periods up to more than a year under the anti-terrorism campaign of President George W. Bush, the United States reported last week to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Civil liberties groups like the International Justice Network and the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the detentions as abhorrent and a violation of U.S. treaty obligations.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is scheduled to question the U.S. government delegation on its compliance with its obligations on May 22 in Geneva.