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Hospital Chief May Have Given Data To Militants

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By KIM GAMEL, The Associated Press

Published: February 14, 2008

BAGHDAD - When twin blasts ravaged crowded pet markets earlier this month, Iraqi authorities offered a chilling account: Mentally disabled women carried the hidden explosives perhaps as unwitting bombers for al-Qaida in Iraq.

Wednesday, the U.S. military brought another stunning twist to the plot - that the acting director of a psychiatric hospital could have betrayed his ethics and turned over patients' details to insurgents blamed for the attack, which killed nearly 100 people.

The questioning of the hospital administrator fits into a wider campaign to confront insurgents' changing tactics - such as using women as suicide bombers - as they seek to bypass increased security measures and bounce back from losses in recent U.S.-led offensives.

But the joint U.S.-Iraqi raids Sunday on the al-Rashad hospital seek to dig deeper into just one deadly day - the Feb. 1 bombings and whether a physician entrusted to care for the mentally disabled could have aided al-Qaida.

Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a military spokesman, said the hospital official was detained "in connection with the possible exploitation of mentally impaired women to al-Qaida."

It was not immediately clear what direct contact occurred between the detained hospital administrator and the two women who carried the explosives into the crowded outdoor pet markets with cages of birds and other small animals.

A spokesman for U.S. troops in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steve Stover, said the hospital official was suspected of providing names and files of hospital patients to insurgents - suggesting the probe could be broader than the attacks earlier this month. He said the hospital director's computer and files were seized.

Stover declined to speculate on a motive, but said al-Qaida often uses threats and extortion to gain recruits or assistance. The hospital is in a mostly Shiite district, and Sunnis dominate the insurgents inspired by al-Qaida.

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