Guards Kill Baghdad Taxi Driver

Workers for security contractor accused of unprovoked slaying

By Lucas Laursen, Newser Staff

Posted Nov 12, 2007 10:05 AM CST

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Guards Kill Baghdad Taxi Driver — Members of a private security company pose on a rooftop in this file photo. Iraqi sources said an employee of private security contractor DynCorp International shot an Iraqi taxi driver unprovoked over the weekend. It's DynCorp's first brush with Blackwater-like trouble in Iraq. (Getty Images)

A convoy run by American security contractor DynCorp International shot and killed an Iraqi taxi driver on a Baghdad roadside Saturday, the Iraqi Interior Ministry said yesterday. “They just killed a man and drove away,” said a spokesman. Witnesses said the driver posed no apparent threat; an Iraqi policeman who examined the car found no explosives, the Times reports.

The taxi driver had pulled his car to the side of the road and had his hazard light flashing, witnesses said. A spokesman for DynCorp said the team in question reported firing its weapons in the incident but was unaware that anyone was wounded or killed. “We knew that we had fired at the front of the vehicle,” he said. “We were kind of surprised that there was a death.”

(More Iraq stories.)

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