A suicide car bomber killed up to 12 Iraqis, including four policemen, near a US-Iraqi base in Baghdad yesterday and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil servant in the second such murder in as many days.
The US-led administration has said insurgents may step up attacks before and after the occupation formally ends on June 30 to disrupt the handover and discredit Iraq's new government.
While the new bloodshed seemed to bear out that prediction, two foreign hostages, a Turk and an Egyptian, were freed after what a mediator called talks with men close to their captors.
Police at the scene of the car bombing said their colleagues had tried to stop a suspicious vehicle hurtling toward an Iraqi military college in southeast Baghdad, where many US soldiers are also based.
Abdul Razzak Kadhem, a senior police officer, said two police cars had intercepted the vehicle, which then exploded, destroying one police car and badly damaging another.
The US military, condemning what it called a "random, senseless act of violence," said the blast had killed eight Iraqi civilians and four police, and wounded 13 people.
Kadhem said earlier four policemen and two civilians had died. Four policemen were wounded.
Two charred bodies could be seen in the burnt wreckage of one police car. All that remained of the bomber's car was a blackened engine in the road. Several civilian vehicles were damaged. Blood stained the driver's seat of a white pick-up.
"One car was blown across the street," said Abdel Hasan al-Jabbar, an off-duty civil-defense worker. "The man inside had blood pouring from the top of his head."
Guerrillas frequently target police and other Iraqis whom they accuse of collaborating with the US-led occupation.
The Iraqi civil servant, Kamal al-Jarrah, 63, who headed the education ministry's cultural relations department, was shot in his garden after stepping out of his house in the western Ghazaliya district of the capital to go to work.
The veteran bureaucrat died in hospital, Abdul Khaliq al-Amiri, secretary to the education minister, said. Jarrah's wife, who was with him in the garden, was unhurt.
In a similarly precise attack on Saturday, gunmen in a car killed Bassam Qubba, the foreign ministry's undersecretary for multinational affairs and international organizations.
Last month, a suicide bombing killed Izzedin Salim, the head of Iraq's now-dissolved Governing Council, and another council member survived an ambush south of the capital.
The Foreign Ministry said Qubba's killing bore "the hallmarks of leftover supporters of Saddam Hussein's evil regime." Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said the interim government "will not be scared or intimidated by Saddamists."
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS