Iraqi police have arrested two of their own officers who confessed to killing 14 Pakistani pilgrims earlier this year, a force spokesman said here on Sunday. The Pakistanis, Shia Muslims travelling across the Iraqi desert to the shrine city of Karbala, were dragged off their bus on September 2 and shot dead. A civilian spokesman for the Iraqi police in Karbala, Rahman Mushawi, said that two officers posted in a small town west of the city, Shalal Mukhimit and Sami Abu Al-Hil, had been arrested. “They confessed their responsibility in this killing,” he said. The Pakistanis appear to have been victims in the sectarian war which has divided Iraq’s Shia and Sunni communities. The Sunni insurgent group Ansar al-Sunna claimed responsibility for the murders three weeks after they took place, in an Internet statement.