Almotamar.net google news - Interior ministry operations director Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf said that 14 officers missing after their convoy was ambushed on Thursday had been found dead in the streets of Baquba, north of Baghdad. The minister is following this case closely and has given the order to hunt these people down and punish them. The police chief in Baquba has collected intelligence information, and the operation is under way," Khalaf said.
Separately, the Iraqi defence ministry announced that it had killed three "terrorists" and arrested nine more in Baquba, but it was not clear whether this was directly related to the hostage murders.
On Thursday evening, around 55 members of the Iraq's Shiite-led interior ministry forces were travelling from Baquba to the nearby town of Khalis to go on leave when they were ambushed by Sunni insurgents.
The gang managed to capture 14 of them, Khalaf said.
Shortly afterwards, a coalition of insurgent groups led by Al-Qaeda said in an Internet message that the hostages would be killed to avenge the alleged rape of a Baghdad Sunni woman by Shiite police.
Late on Friday, a second message said the killings had been carried out and promised that a video of the murders would be released.
"The Islamic state of Iraq gave the government of (Prime Minister Nuri) al-Maliki 24 hours to meet its demands if the 18 interior ministry workers who were arrested in Diyala were to be released," it said in a statement posted on the Internet.
"But the Maliki government, as usual... did not care for their lives... so the Islamic courts ordered the execution of those apostates... who have deemed the blood and honour of Sunnis as permissible," added the statement.
Uday al-Khadran, the mayor of Khalis, said: "They were found in the streets of Baquba. Their throats had been cut and their hands were bound."
Khalaf said that the idea that the men had been killed in response to the alleged rape was propaganda from a group already locked in war with security forces, and expressed optimism that the killers would be caught.
US and Iraqi troops were out in force in Baghdad on Saturday, almost three weeks after the official start of Operation "Fardh al-Qanoon" (Imposing the Law), an ambitious drive to quell sectarian violence in the capital.
At least three pairs of US army Apache helicopter gunships swept in low, tight circles over the city centre firing decoy flares while troops and armoured vehicles set up checkpoints and conducted targeted raids.
US and Iraqi officials confirmed that this week Iraqi and American troops will build their first permanent base in the Baghdad Shiite militia bastion of Sadr City, a joint security station at the edge of the slum district.
It was a similar story in Ramadi, which Al-Qaeda has declared to be the capital of an "Islamic Emirate of Iraq," where residents reported that US forces had sealed all entrances to the city.
The group had demanded that "officers that participated in the horrible act" be turned over to the insurgents and that "all Sunni Muslims held in interior ministry prisons be released."
The alleged rape of Janabi -- who appeared in a video broadcast on Arab news networks to complain of being raped by interior ministry officers -- has triggered a bitter row at the highest levels of the Iraqi state.
Sunni leaders, including Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, have largely given credence to her claims, which some say represent a much bigger problem of daily abuses carried out by government forces.
But Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, was quick to dismiss the charges, alleging the rape was invented by Sunni politicians to tarnish the police at the launch of a large Baghdad security operation.
Maliki branded Janabi a liar and a criminal, and ordered that the officers she accused be commended. He also sacked the head of a government agency that maintains Sunni mosques after he spoke out about the alleged assault.
In Janabi's account of the incident, she said she was raped and beaten by at least four officers after being seized in a sweep of suspected Sunni insurgent safe houses in southwest Baghdad on February 18.
She was later treated at a US military hospital in the fortified Green Zone.
US commanders have said the investigation into her allegations is a matter for the Iraqi authorities, but that they will compile any evidence they hold and give it to investigators if asked.