Iraq arrests paramilitary commander

Baghdad: Iraqi police arrested a senior official in an Iran-backed armed group on Wednesday on suspicion of orchestrating the murder of a prominent pro-democracy activist, a security source told AFP.

Qasem Muslah, a commander in the state-sponsored Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary coalition, is the first high-ranking official in the powerful group to have been arrested in relation to a wave of murders of pro-democracy activists and journalists that started in 2019.

"At dawn in Baghdad, police intelligence arrested Qasem Muslah, Popular Mobilisation Forces (Hashed) operations chief for Anbar province, who gave the order to kill Ihab al-Wazni on May 9 and another activist Fahim al-Taie in December 2019," the security source said.

"We initially had clues about the perpetrators of the murders and verification allowed us to identify with certainty the person who was behind these criminal operations," the source added.