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Baghdad: Iraq wants to tighten control over security contractors after a deadly shooting incident involving the US firm Blackwater, ending their long immunity from Iraqi prosecution, the Interior Ministry said on Friday.
Spokesman Major-General Abdul Kareem Khalaf said the ministry had drafted legislation giving it wider powers over the contractors and calling for "severe punishment for those who fail to adhere to the ... guidelines on how they should operate".
Iraq has said it would review the status of all security firms after what it called a flagrant assault by Blackwater contractors in which 11 people were killed while the firm was escorting a US embassy convoy through Baghdad on Sunday.
Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki suggested the US embassy should stop using Blackwater and said he would not allow Iraqis to be killed "in cold blood".
The shooting has incensed Iraqis who regard the thousands of security contractors working in the country as private armies that act with impunity.
Khalaf said the new draft law, which he expected parliament to pass soon, gives the ministry powers to prosecute the companies and to refuse or revoke contracts.
Many security firms operating in Iraq have no valid licence. A law issued by US administrators after the 2003 invasion which overthrew Saddam Hussain granted them immunity from prosecution and has not been formally revoked.
The New York Times reported yesterday that the Interior Ministry will also propose that foreign security companies be replaced by Iraqi firms.
"These American companies were established in a time when there was no authority or constitution," the newspaper quoted a ministry report as saying.
The head of an association of security firms in Iraq said replacing foreign companies with Iraqi security companies was not a new suggestion and was unlikely to happen overnight.
"One alternative would be partnerships with Iraqi companies, putting an Iraqi face on what we're doing," Lawrence Peter, director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, told Reuters.
Peter said around 30,000 people, half of them Iraqis, worked for security firms in Iraq.
An embassy spokeswoman said on Thursday Blackwater, which employs around 1,000 contractors to protect the US mission and its diplomats, was "still here and still under contract from the State Department".
Attacks
In the latest violence, one US soldier was killed on Thursday by a bomb which exploded near his vehicle in Diyala province, east of Baghdad, the military said.
In Basra gunmen shot dead Shaikh Amjad Al Jinabi, a religious aide to Iraq's top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani on Thursday evening after he had attended a funeral in the Shiite city, Al Sistani's office said.
Another Al Sistani aide was killed in a drive-by shooting in Diwaniyah, police said.
Al Maliki met Sunni lawmakers on Thursday, his office said.
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