A fuel truck bomb killed 17 people in a huge fireball that incinerated cars on a Baghdad street yesterday as violence and instability gripped Iraq in the wake of former president Saddam Hussein's capture.
Hours after US President George W. Bush said Saddam deserved the death penalty, the US-backed Governing Council said the former dictator was being held in the Baghdad area and would face a public trial in Iraq.
The head of Iraq's North Oil Co highlighted the country's continued instability by revealing its northern export pipeline was too vulnerable to reopen after a Sunday attack.
The bomb in Baghdad's Bayya'a district exploded shortly after dawn in a ball of flame that tore through a packed minibus and several civilian cars, police said.
It was not immediately clear whether the explosives had been in the truck or had gone off at the roadside, causing the fuel-laden vehicle to explode.
One police officer said the truck appeared to be aiming for a nearby police station but collided with the minibus, triggering the blast. At least 17 people, mostly passengers, were killed and around 16 were badly burnt in the inferno.
"I was at an intersection and I saw a truck explode in front of me. After that I fainted," 16-year-old Mutaab Aybee said at a Baghdad hospital.
Roadside bombs are a favorite weapon of guerrillas who use them to attack US military patrols.
The US military said yesterday that it had stepped up an offensive to isolate and eliminate members of Saddam's former regime and other cells fighting the US-led coalition.
But the latest bomb and continued protests in a number of cities in the "Sunni triangle" are further blows to hopes that the ousted president's capture would ease guerrilla attacks.
"What can we do? It's our future. Our future is death," said 18-year old Musalam Abdurida, another victim of yesterday's bomb, who lay in a bloody hospital ward.
One protester was shot dead by Iraqi police on yesterday in the northern city of Mosul, where demonstrators burned the offices of two anti-Saddam political parties.
US forces said they arrested eight people in Samarra, 100km north of Baghdad, and rounded up three suspected insurgents in Baquba, 65km north of the capital, including an officer in the Fedayeen militia they said was organizing attacks in the area.
The Samarra arrests were a continuation of Operation Ivy Blizzard, in which US forces said they captured 73 suspected insurgents including a guerrilla leader on Tuesday.
"This is our first crack on the city and we will continue and we are going to control Samarra, but at some point we will hand it over to the Iraqi police," Colonel Nate Sassaman, chief of the 1st battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, told reporters.
"There is going to be a show of force from now on," he said.
Despite intensive US efforts to improve security across the country, the head of the North Oil Co said on yesterday Iraq's northern oil export pipeline was attacked on Sunday along a line running from the Kirkuk oilfields to the Turkish port of Ceyhan and remained too vulnerable to reopen.
"Security measures remain insufficient to start the pipeline," Adel Kazzaz said by telephone from Kirkuk.
Asked at a news conference about reports that US forces had moved Saddam to the Gulf state of Qatar, Iraqi Governing Council member Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said: "Saddam Hussein is present in an area of greater Baghdad ... God willing ... he will be tried in Iraq in public by an Iraqi court."
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