ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - Shock befell Sulaimani province and the Kurdistan Region on Wednesday night when a man killed five members of his family.
Sulaimani police announced Thursday that a 27-year-old man killed five members of his family, including his father, mother, two sisters, and a brother before taking his own life late on Wednesday in the village of Greza, Said Sadiq town, due to what it described “a family dispute”.
“According to the preliminary investigations, it turned out that Bashir Salar Mohammed, born in 1998, killed his family members including his father, mother, two sisters, and a brother using a Kalashnikov rifle, before killing himself,” Sulaimani police announced in a statement on Thursday.
It added they have launched a probe into the incident to learn of “the motive behind the incident.”
Sardar Sabir, Mohammed’s cousin, told The New Region that the killer was “an extremist person and member of the Islamist parties.”
The victims’ relatives said Mohammed had returned to the Kurdistan Region from Europe two days ago to visit his father who had recently undergone heart surgery.
“It is said that [Mohammed’s] was in an unstable psychological state. There needs to be medical evidence to prove it. Therefore, our investigations are ongoing,” Sarkawt Mohammed, spokesperson of the Sulaimani police, told The New Region.
Gun ownership has been the biggest challenge gripping Iraq and the Kurdistan Region since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, despite a myriad of efforts from both governments to try and limit the number of illegal guns in the country.
The Said Sadiq tragedy came as the people of the Kurdistan Region were reeling from the shock of a quite similar incident when a doctor killed his wife and three in-laws, including her father, mother, and sister due to another so-called social issue.
Such incidents are not rare in the Kurdish Region as guns are easily accessed by locals on the black market, despite the government’s repeated attempts to bring the issue under control.
Unofficial figures suggest around 70 percent of the Kurdistan Region’s population own guns at their homes, a key factor contributing to the rise of crimes.
In a bid to reduce social violence, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has already launched a campaign for the registration of unlicensed weapons, imposing strict laws on individuals buying and selling weapons on the black market.
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