On Friday, Iraqi television broadcast the confessions of the person who carried out the assassination of researcher and political expert Hisham al-Hashemi and recognized him as an officer in the Ministry of Interior.
The broadcast of the sensational confessions came hours after Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi announced the arrest of the killers of Al-Hashemi, 47, who was assassinated while he was in his car near his home in Baghdad last July.
The channel identified the accused as the main perpetrator of the assassination, in which a group of four people participated, and they used two motorcycles and a civilian car to carry out the crime.
The channel said that the man named Ahmed Hamdawi Awaid Maarij al-Kinani, who has held the rank of first lieutenant in the Ministry of Interior since 2007, “belongs to a” stray group out of the law”, a term often used by the government to refer to the perpetrators of attacks against military bases that include forces of the International Coalition in Iraq.
In his confessions, Al-Kinani, 36, said that al-Hashemi’s car was monitored on the day of his assassination and followed him until the arrival of his home in the Zayouna area, east of Baghdad, adding that he was the one who personally carried out the assassination with a government weapon, a “Clock” pistol.
The man did not mention the reasons that led him to commit the crime, although there were parties behind that incident. Nor did the television address the fate of the rest of the group participating in the assassination, its motives, or the identity of the party to which they belonged.
And the Iraqi Prime Minister, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, said Friday, that he fulfilled his “promise” he made to the family of the prominent security expert Hisham Al-Hashemi, who was assassinated in front of his home in central Baghdad more than a year ago.
Al-Kadhimi announced, in a tweet on his Twitter account, the arrest of those involved in the killing of Al-Hashemi, and said, “We promised to arrest the killers of Hisham Al-Hashemi, and we fulfilled the promise.”
Al-Kadhimi added in his tweet: “Before that, we put the death squads and the killers of Ahmed Abdul-Samad before justice, and our forces arrested hundreds of criminals involved in the blood of innocents.”
Al-Hashemi, a researcher and activist in civil society, had adopted a strong position in favor of the protests, which demanded a comprehensive reform of the political system and denounced Iranian hegemony over the political decision in Iraq.
Al-Kadhimi pledged, during a visit to Al-Hashemi’s house, two days after his assassination, that the killers will be punished for carrying out the “cowardly crime.”
Dozens of Iraqi opponents have been assassinated since the outbreak of protests in 2019, which killed at least 600 people and injured 30,000, while dozens were briefly kidnapped.
