Iraqi Scientists.. Victims Of Violence

"It was 12:15 pm (0815 GMT). I heard three shots and I saw a man collapse on the street," said Sabah Shukur, whose shop stands directly across Baghdad University ‘s College of Literature in the western district of Bab Al-Muawdam.

A Baghdad morgue’s official told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that Al-Bayati’s body was received "with his body riddled with three shots".

"He was just a geography professor. He had no enemies," said one of his relatives in the morgue.

The death came as Iraqi scientists and intellectuals have been suffering a series of assassination attempts that left some of them killed.

Kamal Jarrah, director of cultural relations at Iraq ‘s education ministry, was gunned down in front of his home Sunday, June 13.

On January 19, Abdel-Latif Al-Mayahi, the deputy director of Arab World Studies Center in Baghdad , was killed by a number of gunmen upon getting out of his house.

Politically-Motivated

Some blamed the seething cauldron of chaos and anarchy for the wave. Others said the assassinations are politically-motivated.

The Guardian reported on May 24 that an Iraqi scientist died of a "sudden hit to the back of his head" while in detention by the U.S. occupation forces.

The cause of death was blunt trauma. It was uncertain exactly how he died, but someone had hit him from behind, possibly with a bar or a pistol, an independent autopsy expert confirmed.

Baghdad University rector Dr. Samy Ahmed Al-Mozaffer had declared that the U.S. Occupation forces detained tens of Iraqi scientists from various Iraqi universities.

"There is something fishy behind such detentions, as interviews are held with university professors in secret and we don’t know what is happening during them,” Al-Mozaffer had said in statements published on August 15, 2003 .

Appealing to the world community to protect them from the U.S. aggression "aimed at draining Iraq’s brains", a number of Iraqi scientists and university professors had sent an SOS e-mail complaining American occupation forces were threatening their lives.

In their e-mail, a copy of which was sent to IslamOnlin.net in April, they asserted that occupation troops demanded them, particularly physicists, chemists and mathematicians, to hand over all documents and researches in their possession.

The appeal message also said that looting and robberies were taking place under the watchful eye of the occupation soldiers.

The angry scientists also underlined that some of them were placed under house arrest and deprived of going to their laboratories and universities.

Some of them were also approached by agents from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to entice them away to foreign scientific centers, the message cautioned.

In April, a retired French general told the French TV Channel 5 that some 150 Israeli commandoes are currently inside Iraq on a mission to assassinate 500 Iraqi scientists.