The video first appeared on the site www.aegisIraq.co.uk which carries the disclaimer that it is not an official site of Aegis, but "belongs to the men on the ground who are the heart and soul of the company." Aegis, which was recently awarded a multimillion-dollar contract by the US government to provide security in Iraq, was started in 2002 by a former Scots Guard officer, Lt. Col. Tim Spicer.
In one of the videoed attacks, a Mercedes is fired on at a distance of several hundred yards before it crashes in to a civilian taxi. In the last clip, a white civilian car is raked with machine gun fire as it approaches an unidentified security company vehicle. Bullets can be seen hitting the vehicle before it comes to a slow stop.Private security contractors in Iraq operate under the same rules as the US military, and cannot be prosecuted by Iraqi officials for use of lethal force. Colonel Spicer posted a note on the www.aegisIraq.co.uk site asking men to be careful about what they posted on the site. The video in question has been removed.There are no clues as to the shooter but either a Scottish or Irish accent can be heard in at least one of the clips above Elvis Presley's Mystery Train, the music which accompanies the video.
A spokesman for Aegis said there is "nothing on the videos to connect them to Aegis in any way." And the British Foreign Office said the issue is "now a matter for the American authorities because Aegis is under contract to the United States."
Meanwhile, in an interview with the British newspaper The Observer, former Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said, "Human rights abuses in Iraq are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record." Mr. Allawi accused fellow Shiites in the Iraqi government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centers.
The brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police, he said.The Washington Post reported on Saturday that Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz Hakim, leader of Iraq's most powerful political party, has called on the United States to let Iraqi fighters take a more aggressive role against insurgents, saying that the only way the insurgency will be defeated is if the US allows Iraq "to get tough.""We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated," he added. "A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them."
He said that immediate action was needed to dismantle militias that continue to operate with impunity. If nothing is done, "the disease infecting [the Ministry of the Interior] will become contagious and spread to all ministries and structures of Iraq's government," he said.
In more than an hour of conversation at his Baghdad home and office, Hakim denied accusations that the Shiite-led government's security forces ? with alleged involvement by his party's armed wing ? have operated torture centers and death squads targeting Sunni Arabs. He also renewed his call to merge half of Iraq's 18 provinces into a federal region in the oil-rich, heavily Shiite south, and he played down Iran's interests in Iraq, saying that the Shiite theocracy to the east wants only what the United States claims to want: a stable Iraq.Allawi, however, warned in his interview with The Observer that if the West leaves behind a "disintegrating Iraq," it will come back to haunt the coalition countries. "Iraq is the centerpiece of this region. If things go wrong, neither Europe nor the US will be safe."
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