Iraq: Killing for water

In the early hours of 18 June, gunmen broke into Faisal Hassan's west Baghdad home killing him, his wife and their two young children. The motive was not sectarian, political or even economic - but water-related. Forty-year-old Hasan was an employee of a local irrigation department in Abu Ghraib city - 32km west of Baghdad and famed in recent times for scandals surrounding its prison. The department he worked for supervised government water distribution to farmland in and around Abu Ghraib. His death brings the number of irrigation department employees killed in this city to three in the past three months, Mohammed Khudhair, a police investigator, said. "All these employees had nothing to do with politics or anti-militant activities, but instead were victims of the nature of their work, which has become a risky one," he said.