Fallujah police officer held over bribe for a warrant that did not exist

ANBAR — A serving Interior Ministry officer was detained in Anbar after allegedly telling a man an arrest warrant had been issued against him and taking money to have it cancelled, the Federal Commission of Integrity said. There was no warrant.

A team from the commission’s Anbar investigation office caught the officer, a member of the Fallujah Police Directorate, as he took the money, it said. The operation was carried out under a judicial warrant, and he and the seized evidence were presented to the investigative judge for integrity cases in Anbar, who ordered him held pending investigation.

It follows a run of cases in which people have sold the disappearance of legal trouble, real or invented. Baghdad’s Karkh Criminal Court jailed two people for four years this week for impersonating commission employees and extorting officials in Anbar, sending threatening messages telling them their names had appeared in the confessions of a detained member of parliament and offering to close the case for money. The commission has warned before that people are exploiting the anti-corruption campaign by posing as its staff.

Similar cases have run through the summer in several governorates: people posing as staff of the chief justice’s office in Najaf, as an oversight committee in Babil and as an Interior Ministry officer in Maysan, a police officer in Nineveh accused of taking a $15,000 bribe, and two municipal legal employees in Najaf caught taking a bribe to close a case over a forged land document.