Alleged killer and rapist of Iraqi journalist 'confesses'

A member of an Iraqi militant group behind the first major attack after the US-led invasion of 2003 admitted to the 2006 rape and murder of an Iraqi journalist in a video confession aired on Tuesday.

Yasser al-Takhi, from the Jaish Mohammed group behind the 2003 truck bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq, and his two brothers were shown confessing after being arrested for the kidnap and murder of Al-Arabiya television presenter Atwar Bahjat and two of her colleagues.

Bahjat, her cameraman Adnan Abdallah and sound engineer Khaled Mohsen were snatched in the northern town of Samarra on February 22, 2006, where they had been reporting on the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine that plunged Iraq towards the brink of civil war.

Their bodies were found a day later, with Bahjat having suffered bullet wounds to the head, neck and chest.

Takhi, 25, told interrogators that he and three others, including his brothers Mahmoud and Ghazwan, kidnapped the news team and drove them to a side street where he raped and shot Bahjat, while his two brothers killed Abdallah and Mohsen with a machine gun.

"We parked beside the main street, I asked the girl to step out and I told her, 'You are pretty and I like you, and I want to have sex with you," he said in the video, adding that Bahjat refused.

"But I put the pistol to her head, and I raped her.

"Ghazwan and Mahmoud, they killed the cameraman and the engineer with a BKC (machine gun). And then, I finished, took her and killed her."

Major General Qassim Atta, spokesman for the Iraqi army's Baghdad operations, said the Takhi brothers were arrested in the capital's southern neighbourhood of Dora but did not say when.

Atta told reporters that Yasser al-Takhi admitted being in Jaish Mohammed (Mohammed's Army), whose August 2003 attack on the UN offices killed the head of the UN mission in Baghdad Sergio De Mello and 21 others.

Takhi also said the kidnap gang, which included driver Noman Hussein, was directed by a man named Gaith al-Abbassi.

"We welcome the announcement, and appreciate the efforts of Iraqi investigators, and we will closely follow the trial, which we hope will deter those who are attacking journalists," said Nasser Sarami, spokesman for the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya.

Born in 1976 to a Sunni father and a Shiite mother, Bahjat previously worked for pan-Arab satellite news channel Al-Jazeera before joining Al-Arabiya.

Takhi said in his confession that he had been arrested twice before by US forces in Iraq, once in October 2003 and again at the end of 2006, but was released both times because "the Americans only investigated him for attacks against them," Atta said.

Atta added that at the time of Takhi's previous two arrests, US and Iraqi forces did not have any co-operation accord, but since a landmark security agreement was signed between Baghdad and Washington in November co-operation had improved.

The 2006 Samarra bombing sparked a wave of sectarian bloodshed that claimed tens of thousands of lives over the following two years, with levels of violence only beginning to decline in recent months.

Iraq remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists.

The Baghdad-based Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO), a media defence organisation, says that 247 media workers, the vast majority of them Iraqi, have been killed since the invasion.