Three people were killed in three separate rooms in a farm of village east of northern, oil-rich city of Kirkuk on Wednesday morning, police said.
The bodies of three people, a husband, his second wife and a brother-in-law, were recovered from a farm in the village of Chiman in the subdistrict of Qarahanjir, east of Kirkuk at 9 am on Wednesday.
The bodies of the owner of the garden, a 70-year-old man of Kurdish ethnicity, and his second wife, a 30-year-old Arab, with her brother, mid fourties, were collected in three separate rooms of the house in the farm.
The woman and her brother are engaged in livestock and gardening in the garden and the owner of the garden, who is the woman's husband, sometimes stayed in the garden with his second wife.
"The three were killed in three different rooms of a house in the garden. The perpetrators have been identified and we are trying to arrest them," police spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Amer Nuri Shuani told KirkukNow, emphasizing the crime was committed by two persons or more.
All three were killed in three different rooms of a house in the farm
The farm is located in a valley of Chiman village, just two kilometers from the main checkpoint of Kirkuk-Sulaymaniyah. In addition to the farm and shelter, it is also a place to raise animals.
The area is relatively empty and there are several other gardens a few kilometers away.
The bodies were taken to the forensic medical examination in Kirkuk.
According to preliminary police investigations, each of the three were killed in three different rooms with three different tools: the owner of the farm was shot dead, his wife was stabbed to death while her brother was hot to death with a cooking gas bottle.
A police source at the scene anonymously said the killers have been identified and police are persecuting them.
"We believe the incident was caused by an old social problem between the owner of the farm and another group in Kirkuk several years ago, when he killed someone from the other side," a source at Azadi police station told KiurkukNow on the condition of anonymity.
Kirkuk, 238 kilometers north of Baghdad, is an ethnically mixed province for 1,7 million Kurds, Sunni and Shiite Arabs, and Turkmens. It has long been at the center of disputed territories between Baghdad and Erbil.
Kirkuk is one of the main disputed territories in addition to Diyalah and Nineveh, that a three-stage process was outlined in Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution in 2005 to put an end to the disputes over these areas between the Kurdistan Region Government KRG and Federal Iraqi government dispute, through normalization, population census and a referendum on the status of the territories.
Currently, the Iraqi army, local and federal police, Brigade 61 of Special Forces along with Shiite paramilitary of Popular Mobilization Forces PMF, are under Kirkuk joint operations’ command, an umbrella for the security forces running the security of Kirkuk province.
