TEN days before he was kidnapped by men in an unmarked Iraqi police car, within sight of a checkpoint manned by British-trained policemen, Steven Vincent talked about Basra’s “death car”.

In fact, the American journalist’s last article for The New York Times read like an epitaph for his own murder on Tuesday night in the southern port city, where thousands of British troops are deployed. He was abducted with Nouriya Itais, the Iraqi woman he employed as a translator.

He wrote: “An Iraqi police lieutenant, who for obvious reasons asked to remain anonymous, confirmed to me the widespread rumours that a few police officers are perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations, mostly of former Baath Party members, that take place in Basra each month. He told me that there is even a sort of ‘death car’: a white Toyota Mk II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment.”

Driving through central Basra with a Times journalist a few days before the article was published, he spotted an identical vehicle near the waterfront. “That’s the death car,” he said. Another journalist reassured him that the rumour was that a different vehicle was now being used for assassinations.

On Tuesday night, as he walked with Ms Itais to exchange some money outside the Merbid Hotel, he found out what the new death car was: a white Chevrolet pick-up without registration plates but with the word Police on it.

Witnesses said that armed men jumped out of the vehicle and bundled him inside. Having written extensively about the Islamic militias who enforce their own harsh law on the city, Mr Vincent struggled to get away. His shoes were later found in the rubbish that litters Basra’s streets. Locals who saw the abduction and were brave enough to inquire what was going on said that the gunmen shouted out that they were policemen. No one dared to intervene.

The Times heard of his abduction in Baghdad at about midnight but could get no response from British military officers. A call to the American military press office in Baghdad was met with a demand for an e-mail detailing the circumstances. An emergency US Army phone number provided for the kidnapping of Westerners, a local number on the notoriously unreliable Iraqi mobile network, elicited only a recorded message.

At 3am word came from Basra that Mr Vincent’s body had been found on a road near the British-controlled airport. He had been shot three times in the head. Ms Itais had been shot in the chest but was still alive, in critical condition.

Mr Vincent, a freelance journalist and a former art critic from New York who witnessed the 9/11 attacks, had been in Basra for three months working on a book about the city. As a freelance, he could not afford the security precautions of larger media outlets — back-up car, walkie-talkies, anti-kidnap training — and knew that he was in danger. He was nervous about leaving the armed confines of the hotel, but did it nonetheless. Based on what he saw, he wrote that the British Army had trained the local police to shoot straight but not to pledge their loyalty to the State instead of Islamic religious or tribal leaders. In conversation he would accuse the British of having turned a blind eye to the rule of the radical Islamists.

“The British stand above the growing turmoil, refusing to challenge the Islamists’ claim on the hearts and minds of police officers,” his last weblog ran. “This detachment angers many Basrans. ‘The British know what’s happening but they are asleep, pretending they can simply establish security and leave behind democracy,’ said the police lieutenant who had told me of the assassinations.”

Most Basrans are too scared to talk about the Islamic covert militias, many of them allegedly funded by Iran. Those who talk do so only behind closed doors, like the young man who told The Times last week how an Islamist group, the Vengeance of God, had come to his family home to assassinate his father, a former officer in the Iraqi navy during the Iran-Iraq war. When the family fought back, the police arrived and arrested them, then tortured them for more than a week. Brigadier Chris Hughes, the commander of 12 Mechanised Brigade, recently admitted to The Times that death squads operated in his region. “Are people still being murdered for political reasons? The answer is most certainly yes,” he said.

Mr Vincent openly criticised the militias. He may also have been a victim of strict moral codes: people suspected that he was having a relationship with an Iraqi and spoke of it in disapproving whispers.

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