A suicide car bomber killed two Iraqis and wounded five yesterday in an attack on a police patrol in an area of Baghdad where insurgents had kidnapped and murdered a defense lawyer in former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's trial last week, police said.
The bomb exploded at 6:30am in the northeastern neighborhood of Shaab, killing two policemen and wounding three policemen and two civilians, police said.
In Kirkuk, 290km north of Baghdad, a roadside bomb exploded at 8:30am near a car carrying Ibrahim Zangana, a senior member of Iraq's Kurdish Democratic Party, seriously wounding him, killing one of his bodyguards and injuring another one.
On Sunday, more than 33 Iraqis died in a swell of violence in Iraq, including 12 laborers, five of them brothers, who were gunned down by insurgents at a construction site outside the city of Hillah, south of Baghdad, police said.
The toll among US service members in the Iraq war also was approaching 2,000 dead. But the US military said it has hampered insurgents' ability to unleash highly deadly suicide bombings with a series of offensives in western towns that disrupted militant operations.
Last Thursday, 10 gunmen wearing police and military uniforms kidnapped Sunni Arab Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, one of the defense lawyers in the trial of Saddam Hussein and seven former officials from his Sunni-dominated regime.
Al-Janabi, the lawyer for Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former head of Saddam's Revolutionary Court, was taken from his office in the Shaab area, and hours later his tortured and bullet-ridden body was found on a sidewalk by the Fardous Mosque in the nearby Ur neighborhood. The 12 remaining Saddam trial defense lawyers have since rejected an offer from the Interior Ministry for better security, demanding protection from US officials instead.
Also on Sunday, investigative judges took testimony from the first witness in the Saddam mass murder trial regarding the 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail. The judges went to a military hospital to take the deposition from Wadah Ismail al-Sheik, a cancer patient who was director of the investigation department at Saddam's feared Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the Dujail massacre. Al-Sheik is too sick to appear in court, and officials did not want to wait until the trial resumes Nov. 28 to get his testimony.
The US military on Sunday confirmed that four US contract workers were killed and two wounded in Iraq last month when their convoy got lost. The attack occurred on Sept. 20 when the convoy, which included US military guards riding in Humvees, made a wrong turn into the mostly Sunni Arab town of Duluiyah, north of Baghdad. Insurgents opened fire with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Three of the dead worked for Houston-based Halliburton Co's KBR subsidiary, the biggest US military contractor in Iraq. It was not clear who the fourth slain American worked for.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS