Ahmed Al-Kinani was a police first lieutenant working with the interior ministry. Al-Kinani confessed to the assassination of Hisham Al-Hashimi, who advocated against Iranian influence in Iraq. On July 16, 2021, a year after al-Hashimi’s killing, Iraq’s Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi announced that authorities had arrested four people involved in his murder. 

Iraqi state TV broadcast a short video of the confession from al-Kinani where he confessed to shooting al-Hashimi with a pistol given to him with instructions to carry out the assassination from an “outlaw group.” While, he did not mention the name of who gave the order or that he was a member of this particular organization, a wide variety of sources assert that this group is Kata’ib Hezbollah.