A few days after Dr Hassan was killed by the Americans, a 16-year-old, Muhammad Ahmed, was making a call on his mobile as he walked down the street A car drew up beside him and a man pointed a pistol. He said: “Give me your phone.” Muhammad refused or hesitated to hand it over for a few seconds too long and the gunman killed him with a bullet in the neck.The third story has a happier ending, though at one moment it seemed likely to end in tragedy It happened in another street in al-Kudat. He drove his car out of a side street on to the airport road without noticing that an American convoy was approaching from behind him. A US soldier thought the car might be driven by a suicide bomber and shot Dr Hassan dead. Not many of his friends attended his funeral because so many had already left Iraq.Mobile phone theft is common all over the world, but in Baghdad people will kill for a handset. This is not because they are more expensive than elsewhere in the world – in fact they are cheaper because nobody pays any tariffs on them – but because murder is so easy No criminal expects to be caught.

Dr Hassan, a specialist in head surgery, was the kind of man who should have been one of the building blocks of the new Iraq. Early one morning a surgeon called Basil Abbas Hassan decided to leave his house in al-Kudat for his hospital in the centre of Baghdad at 7.15am in order to beat the morning rush hour. It was by no means the most dangerous part of Baghdad, and the days when the following events occurred were quieter than those that followed.The first killing was at the hands of the Americans. The death of a thousand people in a stampede during a Shia religious festival in September 2005 was only a one-day wonder abroad. It is worth looking at just three acts of violence in a small part of Baghdad to show how casual killings and kidnappings impacted on the people of the city.

They took place within a few days of each other in September 2005 in or close to al-Kudat, a previously prosperous district in the south-west of the city where many doctors and lawyers once lived. He is planning a solo career and says he might even work as a drugs counsellor. The band he helped make famous may be planning to continue without him, but Hawkins insists his appetite for life, like the famous flames that adorn his midriff, will never be extinguished.. At least four people were killed yesterday in a head-on crash between a passenger train and a freight train near the border of France and Luxembourg. The crash, just inside France, was one of the worst in recent French railway history.