A Baghdad mental hospital administrator has been arrested on suspicion of supplying mental patients to insurgents for use in suicide bombings, a U.S. military spokesman said Wednesday.
The interim administrator at al Rashad psychiatric hospital was arrested Sunday and is being questioned in U.S. custody, said the spokesman, Rear Adm. Greg Smith.
The arrest was part of the probe into double suicide bombings Feb. 1 in Baghdad, which claimed at least 99 lives and were the worst such attack in the capital in nine months.
Iraqi authorities announced within hours of the blasts that the perpetrators were teenage girls with Down syndrome who may have been unwilling participants. U.S. authorities now think that version of events was inaccurate.
A senior American official who asked not to be named because he wasn't authorized to discuss the case publicly said American investigators now thought that the bombers were adults -- one in her 20s, the other in her 30s -- with long histories of psychiatric conditions including depression and schizophrenia.
Investigators think that early Iraqi accounts that the bombers escaped security efforts because they were well-known in the two markets where the bombings occurred also were incorrect. While one of the women was from Baghdad, the other was from outside the city, the senior U.S. official said.
The administrator who's being questioned is suspected of using his access to mental-patient records and possibly providing them to Islamic extremists, the official said.
The U.S. version of events squares better with what witnesses at the market have told McClatchy.