Iraq orders police to round up beggars

The Iraqi Interior Ministry has ordered police to round up beggars, vagabonds and mentally disabled people from the streets of Baghdad to prevent them from being used by insurgents as suicide bombers, a spokesman said Tuesday.

The decision came after a series of suicide attacks, including two female bombers who struck pet markets in Baghdad on Feb. 1, killing nearly 100 people. Iraqi and U.S. officials have said the women were mentally disabled and apparently unwitting bombers.

The people detained in the Baghdad sweep will be handed over to governmental institutions that can provide shelter and care for them, Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said.

"This will be implemented nationwide starting today," Khalaf told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

"Militant groups, like al-Qaida in Iraq, have started exploiting these people in a very bad manner to kill innocents because they do not raise suspicions," Khalaf said. "These groups are either luring those who are desperate for money to help them in their attacks or making use of their poor mental condition to use them as suicide bombers."

Khalaf was not more specific about how those taken into custody would be selected.

The U.S. military said it understood the Interior Ministry intends to transfer those detained to the Ministry of Work and Social Affairs.

"We are aware of the Ministry of Interior's efforts to try and protect homeless and mentally impaired citizens from becoming the unwitting victims of al-Qaida in Iraq," Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a military spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement. "It is our understanding that the MOI intends to transfer these, the most vulnerable of Iraq's people, to the Ministry of Work and Social Affairs."

Police officials at least two stations in western Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information to the media, said they had received the orders but had not yet acted on them. Police at several other stations, however, said they had not received the orders yet.

The Iraqi claim that mentally disabled women were used in the pet market bombings was met initially with skepticism. Iraqi authorities said they based the assertion on photos of the bombers' heads that purportedly showed the women had Down syndrome, and did not offer any other proof.

The U.S. military later backed the Iraqi account of the bombings, which led U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to call al-Qaida in Iraq "the most brutal and bankrupt of movements."

American and Iraqi troops later detained the acting director of a psychiatric hospital on suspicion of helping supply patient information to al-Qaida in Iraq.

Smith, the military spokesman, said at the time that the suspect was being questioned "in connection with the possible exploitation of mentally impaired women to al-Qaida."

The allegations fit into a wider campaign of confronting insurgents' changing tactics — such as using women or children as suicide bombers — as they seek to bypass stepped-up security measures and bounce back from losses in recent U.S.-led offensives.

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Associated Press writer Kim Gamel contributed to this report.