Killings of Aid Workers in Iraq Tied to Missing Funds

From today's NY Times:

The killing of Fern Holland, a human rights worker from Oklahoma, remains unsolved and as mysterious as it was when her body was found riddled with bullets on a desolate stretch of road near one of Iraq's southern holy cities in March 2004.

Now, federal investigators are grappling with a second mystery: what happened to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash issued by American authorities to Ms. Holland and Robert J. Zangas, a press officer who died in the same attack near Karbala, in the days before their deaths?

Financial records from the American-run compound in Hilla, the south-central Iraqi city where Ms. Holland and Mr. Zangas were based, have established that much or all of that money — issued for things like programs to train Iraqis in democratic governance and construction of women's rights centers that Ms. Holland was setting up — was either missing or improperly accounted for after their deaths.

American investigators are trying to determine whether that money was stolen as part of the web of bribery, kickbacks, theft and conspiracy that they have laid out in a series of indictments and court papers describing corruption by American officials in Hilla in 2003 and 2004, according to officials involved in the inquiry. That corruption case, centered on reconstruction efforts, has led to four arrests, and more are expected.

The killings of Ms. Holland, a 33-year-old lawyer and dogged advocate of women's rights, and Mr. Zangas, 44, a former Marine lieutenant colonel from Pittsburgh, received wide attention at the time in part because they had been the first civilians of the American occupation government, called the Coalition Provisional Authority, to die in Iraq.