Police arrest 4 suspects in Kirkuk

KIRKUK / IraqiNews.com: A police force arrested four suspects in central Kirkuk on Sunday, according to a source from the province’s police operations room. “The four were arrested in search raids in the areas of al-Musallah and al-Hussein, thanks to intelligence tip-offs,” the source told IraqiNews.com. Kirkuk, 250 km (156 miles) north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, sits on the ruins of a 5,000-year-old settlement. Because of the strategic geographical location of the city, Kirkuk was the battle ground for three empires, Assyria, Babylonia and Media which controlled the city at various times. Kirkuk is the centre of the northern Iraqi petroleum industry. It is a historically and ethnically mixed city populated by Assyrians, Kurds, Arabs and Iraqi Turkmen. The population was estimated at 1,200,000 in 2008. AmR (P) 1