Kirkuk police and traffic police each has filed a separate complaint against a driver for attacking and injuring a traffic policeman in Kirkuk. According to the law, the driver is expected to be sentenced to one to three years in prison.
The accident occurred on Saturday, August 13, "when the traffic police asked the driver for a license and annual card of vehicle," said Osama Khalid, spokesman for the Kirkuk traffic police.
"The driver was driving a car with black windows, which is not allowed according to traffic regulations and the driver should be punished and his annual vehicle and driving license should be confiscated," Khalid told KirkukNow.
"The driver refused to give him the documents, which led to an argument and hit the policeman with his cell phone and injured him," he said.
A video obtained by KirkukNow shows the policeman bleeding during the incident, while a young man in a room in the traffic cabin, who appears to be the driver, shouts couple of times, “he took the initiative and hit me.”
He took the initiative and hit me; you can look back at the traffic cameras
The video also shows several traffic officers and a traffic vehicle around putting the driver into a vehicle.
"The court and police can look at the cameras in the area because the traffic officer took the initiative in the fight," a relative of the driver told KirkukNow.
However, the spokesman of the Kirkuk traffic police insisted that the driver took the initiative and injured the traffic police officer.
"The traffic policeman received treatment in hospital and we have filed a complaint against the driver and is currently in custody at the Azadi police station," spokesman for Kirkuk traffic police said.
According to the second paragraph of Article 38 of the Traffic Law No. 8 of 2019, anyone who attacks a traffic officer while performing his duty will be imprisoned for not more than one year. However, if he is injured and hurt by it, or if his official clothes are torn, the punishment will be more severe.
Meanwhile, the directorate general of Kirkuk police said in a statement Sunday morning, "On the recommendation of the Kirkuk police command, we will file a complaint against the man who attacked a traffic policeman.”
The complaint will be filed under Article 230 of the Iraqi Penal Code.
According to the article, the driver is punishable by less than three years in prison or a fine if the employee is on official duty.
According to KirkukNow, the driver's relatives are trying to reach an agreement with the policeman's family to resolve the issue through tribal reconciliation out of court.
Kirkuk, located 238 kilometers north of Baghdad, is an ethnically mixed province for 1.7 million Kurds, Sunni and Shiite Arabs, and Turkmen. 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.
