ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Iraq’s interior minister has fired Baghdad’s chief of police and other senior officers after 15 inmates broke out of the city’s Rusafa prison on Saturday night.
Yassin Taha, Iraq’s interior minister, sacked three senior police officers in the Iraqi capital over the escape. The convicts were all being held for drug offenses, according to reports.
Those sacked include Baghdad’s police chief Major General Ali Jasim al-Ghariry, Rusafa police department head Major General Haitham Ali Hassan, and Bab al-Sheikh police department head General Bassam Hussein Ramadhan.
They have all been taken into custody pending an interior ministry probe.
The ministry has formed a committee to investigate prison and police staff to determine how the inmates were able to escape.
Security forces were deployed on Saturday to set up checkpoints across the city.
Two inmates were recaptured on Saturday night, according to Saad Maan, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, and three more on Sunday morning.
“Iraqi security forces’ checkpoints was able to arrest another prisoner who escaped from Rusafa prison on Saturday, who was only meters away from the Rusafa prison in an unfinished house,” Maan said.
“Also Baghdad Operations Command arrested another prisoner on the Baghdad-Wasit main road.”
Abdullah was previously the Director of Baghdad Combating Crime Department.
Last year saw several mass prison breaks across Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, many of them jihadists and Islamic State (ISIS) militants.
In May 2018, seven inmates died and several more were wounded in a fire following an attempted prison break at a Duhok.
In December 2018, 21 prisoners, including ISIS members, reportedly escaped from a detention facility in Sulaimani province.
The Iraqi government announced the territorial defeat of ISIS in December 2017. However, remnants of the group have returned to earlier insurgency tactics, ambushing security forces, kidnapping and executing suspected informants, and extorting money from vulnerable rural populations.
ISIS militants swept across northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, seizing control of several large Sunni-majority cities.
