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Al-Qaeda recruits mentally ill
19/02/2008 13:43 - (SA)
Baghdad - Al-Qaeda has infiltrated the records of Iraqi psychiatric hospitals and is using the information to recruit mentally ill women as suicide bombers, the US military believes.
Two women who carried explosives into Baghdad pet markets on February 1 and caused blasts that killed 100 people had both been treated at different psychiatric hospitals in Baghdad in the weeks prior to the attacks, said US military spokesperson Rear Admiral Gregory Smith.
"We believe al-Qaeda may have approached them individually, away from their families, and recruited them for these barbaric attacks," Smith told AFP.
He believed their files and contact details may have been leaked by hospital staff.
"Our concern is that... al-Qaeda in Iraq has infiltrated records of psychiatric hospitals," he said. "
Auditory hallucinations
One of the women involved in the February 1 bombings had been treated for schizophrenia and depression for several months as an outpatient at Ibn-Rushd hospital.
She had told doctors she had been hearing voices telling her to kill herself.
The other woman also had a history of mental illness and was being treated, also as an outpatient, at another clinic, which Smith did not identify.
"Both women had reduced mental capacity," he said. But claims by the Iraqi authorities that the pair had been suffering Down's Syndrome did not appear to be supported by their psychiatric records, he added.
As part of the investigations, Sahi Abub al-Maliki, acting administrator of major Baghdad psychiatric hospital Al-Rashad, was detained last week and was being questioned about whether he passed on files or patient information.
Bomber treated in hospital
The director of Ibn-Rushd hospital, Dr Shalan al-Abbudi, confirmed to AFP that a woman identified by the US military as having being one of the market bombers had been treated at his facility.
"US forces came with pictures, we could not know the faces, they gave me a name," he said. "After searching our files, we found one with the same name.
"According to them, she is one of the bombers. But I cannot say whether she was suicidal or a victim of an act."
Abbudi added that the woman had been diagnosed as having "schizophrenia with depressive symptoms, auditory hallucination; voices ordering her to end her life. She was given the proper treatment and (electrical shocks)."
The director was adamant that no one from his institution, which deals with acute cases of mental illness, was involved.
"No information from my hospital records was passed outside to anyone and for any reason," he said.
A day after the market bombings, the worst attacks in Baghdad in six months, Major General Jeffery Hammond, commander of US forces in Baghdad, told reporters the women were likely used because they "were less likely to know what was happening ... They were less likely to be searched."
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