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Militants escape, seven police dead in Iraq clash

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-12-26 18:16

BAGHDAD -- Three senior Islamist militants being held by Iraqi authorities escaped in clashes overnight at a police station in Iraq's western city of Ramadi in which seven police and seven militants were killed, an official said.

Police imposed a curfew and searched homes in Ramadi, a largely peaceful city 100 km (60 miles) west of Baghdad, the morning after the battle in the al-Fursan police station, said Major-General Tareq Yusuf, police commander for Anbar province.

Yusuf said that prisoners in the police station overpowered a policeman who entered a cell around 2 a.m. on Friday, stealing the man's weapon and killing him.

Six other police officers, including a lieutenant colonel and a captain, were killed in subsequent clashes and six were wounded, Yusuf said. Seven of the militants inside the police prison were killed in the fighting, he said.

Three leaders of the al Qaeda-linked Sunni Islamist group Islamic State in Iraq escaped during the fighting, said Yusuf, also known as Tareq al-Dulami.

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Anbar province, a vast desert province bordering Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, was once the heart of Iraq's Sunni insurgency. But it became far quieter after local Sunni Arabs began supporting US efforts against al Qaeda and other militants in late 2006.

The United States handed security control of Anbar to the Iraqi government in September, but US Marines are still stationed in the province.

Yusuf said that police were going house to house with photos of the escaped inmates on Friday morning. He pledged the militants would be captured.