A suicide bomber detonated a garbage truck packed with explosives yesterday outside a hotel used by Western contractors, killing himself and at least three people, officials said.
Dozens of people were injured in the dawn truck blast. Police officer Mazin Hamid said the attacker drove the truck into a parking lot between the Sadeer hotel, which has been repeatedly attacked by gunmen in the past, and the Ministry of Agriculture.
Volleys of automatic weapons fire could be heard before and after the explosion.
PHOTO: AP
Police said a group of insurgents wearing police uniforms first shot dead a guard at the ministry's gate, allowing the garbage truck to enter a compound the ministry shares with the hotel. Foreign security officials said other security guards in the area then fired on the vehicle, trying to disable it before it exploded.
Casualties were taken to several hospitals in the city.
Officials at al-Kindi hospital said at least three dead and five wounded were taken there.
Ibn al-Nafis hospital counted at least 27 wounded, said Dr Falleh al-Jubouri.
The massive blast shook buildings in the area and covered a huge swath of sky with acrid black smoke, much of it coming from the flaming wreckage of the truck and several other burning cars. Around 20 vehicles in the parking lot were damaged.
35 bodies discovered
Police yesterday also said they found 35 bodies in two different places in Iraq, some shot to death, the others beheaded.
Twenty of the corpses were found late on Tuesday near Rumana, a village about 20km east of the western city of Qaim, near the Syrian border, police Captain Muzahim al-Karbouli said.
Each of the bodies was riddled with bullets and found wearing civilian clothes, al-Karbouli said. The dead included one woman, but their identities were not known, he said.
Al-Karbouli said the victims appeared to have been killed several days earlier. They had not been died up or beheaded, as other victims have in Iraq.
A separate discovery was made on Tuesday south of Baghdad in Latifiya, where 15 headless bodies were found by Iraqi troops.
The decapitated corpses were found inside an abandoned base of the former Iraqi army, defense ministry Captain Sabah Yassin said. The bodies included 10 men, three women and two children.
Yassin said the bodies had no identification on them. But some of the dead men were thought to have been part of a group of Iraqi soldiers who were kidnapped by insurgents in the area two weeks ago, Yassin said.
`friendly fire' probes
Meanwhile, the US military said it will fast-track an investigation into why American troops fired on a car carrying Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, a journalist for the left-wing Il Manifesto newspaper, during a rescue from insurgents. Sgrena was wounded and Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari was killed in the incident.
The decision came as it also opened an inquiry on Tuesday into the shooting death of a Bulgarian soldier Private Gardi Gardev. That death appeared to be another friendly fire incident that also happened on Friday.
Both probes were an indication of the pressure being brought on the Bush administration by the few US allies in Europe that have steadfastly supported his policies in Iraq.
Italy and its prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, sent 3,000 troops to Iraq, while Bulgaria has 460. Both countries have said they will not withdraw their troops, but domestic pressure to bring them home has been growing -- especially in Bulgaria where it has become an election issue.
In other news, Interim National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie said ousted dictator Saddam Hussein could stand trial by year's end. "I will be surprised if I do not see Saddam in the box before the end of the year," he said. "I am very much hopeful that Saddam will be in the box around September and October, before the general referendum" on a constitution.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS