Immunity for security firms in Iraq scrapped: FM

The United States has agreed to scrap immunity for foreign security guards in Iraq, allowing them to be prosecuted under national laws, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said on Tuesday, as MPs went into a closed session to discuss the controversial long-term security pact with Washington.

"The immunity for private security guards has been removed. The US has agreed on it," Zebari told AFP after briefing Iraqi MPs on the controversial US-Iraq security pact which is being negotiated.

The U.S. embassy spokeswoman in Baghdad, Mirembe Nantongo, declined to make any comment. "We do not comment on the contents of the ongoing negotiations," she said.

The lifting of the immunity offered to foreign private security contractors has been a longstanding demand from Iraqi lawmakers.

Zebari was briefing MPs on developments in the talks between Washington and Baghdad over the military pact dealing with US forces, the parliament said in a statement.

"The Iraqis have been suffering because of this," said Mahmud Othman, an MP who attended Tuesday's closed-door session.

Foreign security workers operate virtually outside the law, neither subject to the Iraqi legal system nor to US military tribunals.

Immunity is a sensitive issue in Iraq after an incident in which security guards from the U.S. company Blackwater shot dead 17 Iraqis in broad daylight in Baghdad last September.

The firm is one of the biggest private security contractors operating in Iraq and provides security to US embassy officials in the violence-wracked country, including ambassador Ryan Crocker.

U.S. President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki agreed in principle last November to sign a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) by the end of July.

The agreement is to set down the ground rules for a continuing U.S. troop presence in 2009 after the UN mandate for foreign forces expires in December 2008.

But last month Maliki said the talks had reached a deadlock amid strong opposition from all the political factions, with some Shiite leaders denouncing the proposed agreement as "eternal slavery" for Iraq.