Man shoots police during father arrest in Erbil

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A man opened fire at police officers on Monday while his father was being arrested in Erbil province’s Pirmam district, lightly wounding two officers, according to the police.

Erbil’s police said that a suspect who had an arrest warrant was detained at a national ID card office in the province.

“The suspect’s son… opened fire, lightly wounding two policemen,” the police said in a statement on Facebook, adding that both the father and his son have been arrested.

Hamid Kakayi, mayor of Pirmam, told Rudaw that while the father was being taken into a police vehicle “a relative opened fire.”

Despite the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) efforts to regulate and reduce violent incidents, shootings remain problematic in the Region.

The Kurdistan Region has long maintained a lax firearms black market, where sniper rifles and machine guns are purchased in a region where an estimated 70 percent of the population own weapons.

The KRG’s interior ministry in 2023 announced that more than 17 thousand civilian weapons had been registered over a year after the government introduced stricter gun laws.