ISTANBUL - US troops raided in mid-February the offices of the Turkmen political party in northern Iraq, breaking windows and doors and firing at random from the building, a party official told the Turkish news agency Anatolia Sunday.
"On February 15 at about five in the morning, a group of American soldiers attacked our building in Mosul," said Turkmen Front of Iraq (ITC) official Mehmet Tahir.
"They locked up the security guards in a room and took their guns and mobile telephones. They searched the rooms, broke the doors and the windows.
"Then from the roof, after having put on the uniforms of our security guards, they fired at random on the neighbourhood. Afterwards, they left," Tahir said, adding there were no injuries during the raid.
Tahir is ITC president for the city of Mosul, in northern Iraq, where there have been a number of attacks against US soldiers and Iraqi security forces.
He said he had tried in vain to talk with US officials in Mosul and believed that the aim of the operation by the soldiers had been to discredit his party.
The Turkmen people, a Turkish-speaking minority in the regions of Kirkuk and Mosul, an important oil zone in the north of Iraq, are supported by Turkey which has claimed a special status for the multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk.
Their main party, the ITC, obtained 93,480 votes and three seats in the 275-seat Iraqi parliament following the elections held on January 30.
The Turkmen people demonstrated earlier this month claiming the Kurdish ethnic group had rigged the vote in Kirkuk as part of a suspected plot to seize its oil riches and make it the capital of a future independent Kurdish state.
02/27/2005 19:27 GMT