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Hitmen captured; several caches destroyed

March 8, 2006

BAGHDAD (Army News Service, March 8, 2006) – Suspected terrorists who have been known to engage in ‘murder-for-hire’ assassinations were captured in Coalition operations Feb. 26.

Soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, Company B, 10th Mountain Division had been conducting a routine inspection of vehicles in western Abu Ghraib.

During a search of a suspicious vehicle, troops discovered two known murderers of Iraqi civilians. The men were carrying rifles and contracts for the murder of other Iraqis.

A day prior, C Company troops acted on a tip from an Iraqi citizen and found a large weapons cache buried in an empty field a few miles west of Baghdad. Various bomb-making materials and weapons were destroyed in a controlled explosion.

“This is a big source of motivation for our Soldiers,” said Staff Sgt. Douglas Batchko, who led his troops on the search that revealed the cache. “Finding and destroying weapons caches like these marks a huge blow to the insurgency.”

Hussein’s home town yields weapons cache

Elsewhere, in the northern Iraqi city of Tikrit, Iraqi and Coalition Forces discovered a large cache of tank rounds March 2, 96 armor-piercing rounds were seized and transported to a nearby military base for disposal.

Another cache was located by a combined Iraqi and U.S. patrol operating near Tall Afar. The cache contained bulk explosives, blasting caps, mortar rounds, hand grenades, automatic weapons and a mortar tube along with a large amount of anti-aircraft artillery rounds. An explosives ordnance disposal team destroyed the cache on site.

A tip from a local resident led Iraqi and U.S. Soldiers to a third cache near Mosul and also resulted in the capture of a man believed to be involved in constructing devices for suicide bombers. The tip led Soldiers to a cache of artillery shells, automatic weapons and ammunition.

(Editor’s note: Article compiled by Sgt. Ken Hall at ARNEWS with contributions by Capt. Douglas Herrmann and Spc. Carlos Caro 1-87 Inf., 1st BCT, 10th Mtn. Div. and 101st Airborne (Air Assault) PAO.)