"I pointed my gun at him and asked him to take off all his clothes. He asked me why you did this. I said to take pictures of you and take money from you... Then I shot him with two bullets and killed him." That was part of the confessions of the main suspect in killing a young man from Kirkuk.
The General Directorate of Counter-Terrorism - affiliated to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan PUK- on December 9, 2022, published a brief statement and a three-and-a-half-minute video of the arrest and confessions of an accused of "killing" a young man from Kirkuk.
Ahmed Azad, a student in the first stage of the Faculty of Law at the University of Kirkuk and one of the top students at the level of Kirkuk Governorate in grade 12, was found dead on the morning of November 29, 2022, in a street near the neighborhood of Shoraw, with traces of two bullets that hit his head and heart.
The main suspect in the killing of the young man, who was revealed by the counter-terrorism unit, is a 29-year-old citizen from Chamchamal district, married and father of three children, who sells weapons on the black market and through social media pages.
“On November 28, a young man called and inquired if I had a gun for sale, and I answered him yes, so he said I will call you again to bring me the gun,” he said in the video.
The accused indicated that Ahmed called him on the same day again to bring him the gun, so he told him that he would send him the gun through a taxi driver and they agreed on an amount of $240, but, “I decided to take the gun for him myself, without telling Ahmed.”
According to the accused, after his arrival in Kirkuk, he called Ahmed with his own number and introduced himself as a taxi driver carrying a package that he wanted to deliver to him.
The address Ahmed gave to the accused was the Top City Market in the Rahimawa neighborhood of Kirkuk.
"He came into the car and said he had 800 dollars. He paid me 300 dollars and I gave him back the change... He told me that he was the first in the school in Iraq and that the officials honored him and he had money.”
“He showed me a video clip showing officials awarding him."
The accused says that Ahmed asked him to drive him to Circle Street in Kirkuk, and that he went down there and crossed to the other side of the street, but the accused did not leave and kept following him, then approached him and asked him what he was doing there, so Ahmed told him that he wanted to test the pistol.
"I told him I will try it for you. I took the gun from him and pulled the trigger. I told him to take off his clothes. He asked me why you did this. I told him to take pictures of you and blackmail you."
In his confessions, the accused says, "(Ahmed) was wearing a shirt and a t-shirt, and when he took it off, he attacked me. I fired several random shots...I pointed the pistol at his chest and said, I will kill you if you come closer.
“At that moment, a bullet fired from the pistol and hit his chest, and he fell to the ground, and in order to make sure that he died, I fired another shot in his head, left the gun there and ran."
The video clip of the confessions of the person accused of killing the young man was published a day after the Kirkuk Governorate Police Command which announced the arrest of the key suspect.
The Counter-Terrorism Service CTS indicated in a statement that the arrest operation came after careful follow-up and information gathering in coordination with the West Sulaymaniyah Asayish (Kurdish security), the Intelligence Directorate and the Kirkuk Governorate Asayish.
Located 238 kilometers north of Baghdad, the oil-rich city of Kirkuk is an ethnically mixed province for 1.7 million Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens, Muslims, Christians and Kaka'is. It has long been at the center of disputes between Baghdad and the Erbil.
