ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Iraq’s interior ministry on Wednesday announced the killing of a man accused of fatally shooting a police officer a day prior in the capital, Baghdad, while police were carrying out an arrest warrant. “The brave men in the federal police forces were able to reach the accused and besiege him inside a house in the same area where he committed the crime, where he tried to clash with the forces executing the duty, but they responded and killed him immediately,” the ministry said in a statement. On Tuesday, Iraqi police officer Ahmed Younis Obaid was killed while carrying out an arrest warrant for a murder case against a suspect in the Nahrawan subdistrict, located about 25 kilometers northeast of Baghdad. Iraqi Interior Minister Abdul Amir al-Shammari attended his funeral on Wednesday morning, According to the ministry, police forces in Nahrawan also arrested another man accused of “shooting at our security forces yesterday while they were executing the arrest warrant,” and he “confessed to this cowardly and illegal act.” The Iraqi government wants to bring gun ownership under control and has allocated one billion Iraqi dinars (about $764,000) for each province to purchase unregistered weapons from citizens. In 2018, Iraqi authorities ramped up efforts to monitor gun ownership by drafting strict new regulations on the buying and selling of firearms - the first of their kind in decades. The law required citizens wanting to purchase a gun to obtain official authorization and an identity card.
