Iraqi parliament sends to judiciary report on Maliki's responsibility for Mosul fall

The Iraqi parliament on Monday referred a report of an investigation panel that found former prime minister Nuri al-Maliki and dozens of security and political officials responsible for the fall of Iraq's northern city of Mosul, to the country's judiciary, an official said.

"The lawmakers voted in majority during their session today over referring the report about the fall of Mosul to the judiciary without reading the report," a parliament official told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The parliament's move to send the report without reading it in the session came to curb the tension between the political blocs, after Maliki's State of Law bloc threatened to walk out of the session in protest at the report that they considered politically biased, the official said.

Earlier in the day, the State of Law lawmakers held a meeting with Speaker Salim al-Jubouri, who pledged not to read the report during the session and only to vote to refer it to the judiciary, in order not to defame the names mentioned in the report, including Maliki, and let their alleged responsibility for the fall of Mosul to be decided by the judiciary, the official added.

On Sunday, a parliamentary investigation panel tasked with probing the fall of Mosul to Islamic State militants finalized its report after the majority of its 24 members voted in favor of the report, which found dozens of security and political officials responsible for the fall of the city.

The report showed that more than 30 political and security officials were held responsible for the June 2014 collapse of the security forces in Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, including Maliki, former Mosul governor Atheel al-Nujaifi, former acting defense minister Sadoun al-Dulaimi, former army chief of staff Gen. Babakir Zebari and former commander of provincial operations Lt. Gen. Mahdi al-Gharrawi, in addition to other senior officials, the official said.

The security situation in Iraq drastically deteriorated since June 10, when bloody clashes broke out between the Iraqi security forces and the IS group, an al-Qaida offshoot, which took control of the country's northern province of Nineveh and later seized swathes of territories after Iraqi security forces abandoned their posts in other Sunni provinces. Enditem