Links
After years of war, Iraqis hit by frenzy of crime
The kidnappers holding an Iraqi auto mechanic's 11-year-old son gave him just two days to come up with $100,000 in ransom. When he could not, they were just as quick to deliver their punishment: They chopped off the boy's head and hands and dumped his body in the garbage.
The boy's final words to his father came in an agonizing phone call. "Daddy, give them the money. They are beating me," Muhsin Mohammed Muhsin pleaded a day before he was killed.
As the worst of the country's sectarian bloodshed ebbs, Iraqis now face a new threat to getting on with their lives: a frenzy of violent crime.
Many of those involved are believed to be battle-experienced former insurgents unable to find legitimate work. They often bring the same brutality to their crimes that they showed in the fighting that nearly pushed the country into a Sunni-Shiite civil war in 2006 and 2007.