Word: mehdi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Known affectionately to his friends and family as Abu Ziad (father of Ziad), Hafedh Aboud Mehdi, 58, woke up on the morning of June 25, packed a lunch for himself and his son, as he often does, and left his home in Baghdad's central Karrada district at 7:30 a.m. He was driving his 1996 maroon Opel Vita en route to Baghdad International Airport, where he has worked at the airport bank for the past 13 years...
That morning Mehdi ran into his 21-year-old son Mohammed, who works as a driver shuttling bank employees to and from work. His son had been stopped in traffic at a checkpoint on the way to the airport, with six people stuffed in his car. Having a VIP pass that allows him to proceed through checkpoints without waiting in the usual lines, Mehdi volunteered to take a couple of female passengers off his son's hands. Maha Adnan Youssef, 31, and Suroor Shahid Ahmed, 32, decided to switch cars...
...that "a weapon was recovered from the wreckage" and "two MND-B convoy vehicles received bullet hole damage from the small arms fire." But the Iraqi police report, which was obtained by TIME, had a different account: "Twenty-seven bullet holes [were found] on the right-hand side of [Mehdi's] car. [We] found two bullets of caliber 50 mm inside the car ... We did not see or find any weapons or empty cartridges inside...
...Iraqi police report identified the three "charred" bodies inside the car as Hafedh Aboud Mehdi, Youssef and Ahmed. If the trio had in fact been armed, says an Interior Ministry official, it would have been the first time ever that an Iraqi had gotten a weapon through all the checkpoints to try to carry out an attack on that stretch of road. The contention over what happened - with the Iraqi accounts at odds with the initial U.S. report - had overtones of other controversial episodes, including the 2005 events in Haditha...
Maliki's visit Thursday to Najaf, where he met with Sistani, seemed to be acknowledgment of just that change in status, one that the Ayatollah did not appear to shrink from. "Sistani emphasized that everything should be done to get back total sovereignty on all levels," said Sheik Abdul Mehdi al-Karbala'e, who summed up Sistani's meeting with Maliki in a speech to Shi'ite follower attending Friday prayers in Karbala...