23 January 2017•Update: 24 January 2017
SALADIN, Iraq
Iraqi authorities have executed 31 people convicted of involvement in the 2014 mass killing in northern Iraq of hundreds of Iraqi military personnel by the Daesh terrorist group, according to an Iraqi government official.
"They had been convicted of taking part in the Speicher Massacre," Mahmoud Khalaf, mayor of the Samarra district in Iraq’s north-central Saladin province, told Anadolu Agency on Monday.
On June 12, 2014, Daesh terrorists overran Saladin before positing a video online purporting to show the mass killing of hundreds of security officers and army cadets in the province.
The slain officers were alleged to have been affiliated with Saladin’s U.S.-run Speicher military base.
At the time, Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry put the number of those killed at 2,398.
According to Khalaf, the bodies of those executed on Sunday were being held at hospitals in Samarra for eventual delivery to their families.
Those executed on Sunday were arrested in 2015 after Iraqi forces recaptured Saladin. Last year, an Iraqi court sentenced them to death.
Iraq has remained in a devastating security vacuum since mid-2014, when Daesh overran the northern city of Mosul and captured a number of other provinces in Iraq and neighboring Syria.
*Reporting by Safiye Karabacak; Writing by Sorwar Alam
