Print

Mail

wiki links

At least seven killed by car bomb in Iraq

A car bomb exploded in a market in the northern city of Mosul yesterday, killing at least seven people and wounding 28, officials said.

The attack was aimed at a police patrol but missed its target and hit the market instead. At least seven civilians were killed and 28 were wounded, according to police and Baha al-Bakri of the Mosul General Hospital. Five cars also were left charred, police said.

A roadside bomb also struck a British armored vehicle at 6am south of Amarah, 290km southeast of Baghdad, British spokeswoman Captain Kelly Goodall said, adding that nobody was wounded but the vehicle was heavily damaged.

Police also said two mortar rounds landed outside the British/Australian base in Samawah, 370km southeast of Baghdad, but no injuries or serious damage were reported.

The attacks underscored the increasing danger facing coalition forces in predominantly Shiite southern Iraq, which has been relatively quiet during a more than three-year-old Sunni-led insurgency but has seen an increase in attacks in recent months.

A self-styled Shiite Muslim insurgent group has pledged to fight US, British and other coalition forces but to spare Iraqi civilians and soldiers.

"We have been patient enough and we have given the political process a chance," the Islamic Resistance in Iraq -- Abbas Brigades said in a videotape aired on Sunday by a Lebanese TV station.

Elsewhere, the bullet-riddled bodies of five Iraqi soldiers were found by a sanitation plant in Mandali, on the Iranian border 100km east of Baghdad, police said.

A mortar round struck a popular fruit and vegetable market in northeastern Baghdad, wounding nine people, police Captain Ali al-Obeidi said. Television news footage showed crumpled metal stalls and smashed cucumbers and tomatoes, with a pool of blood on the ground.

A suicide car bomber apparently targeting an Iraqi patrol also blew himself up near the al-Kindi hospital in eastern Baghdad, wounding two soldiers, two policemen and one civilian, Lieutenant Ahmed Qassim said.

People in the Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah in northern Baghdad ventured back out onto the streets, which were calm a day after fierce clashes between Iraqi soldiers and gunmen.

The clashes broke out after attackers fired nine rockets, some of which landed near the country's most revered Sunni shrine, the Grand Imam Abu Hanifa mosque, and lasted about three hours, witnesses said.

Meanwhile, authorities found telephone numbers of senior Iraqi officials in the cellphone of Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after his death in a US airstrike last month, a legislator said yesterday.

Waiel Abdul-Latif, a member of former prime minister Ayad Allawi's party, did not give names of the officials. But he said they included ministry employees and members of parliament.

He said Iraqis "cannot have one hand with the government and another with the terrorists." He called for an investigation into the case to punish those whose numbers were found.

Al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq group, and several aides were killed in a US airstrike north of Baghdad on June 7.

And in related news, the main Sunni Arab political bloc began a boycott of the parliament on Sunday to protest the kidnapping of a Sunni legislator and threatened to withdraw its members from the prime minister's Cabinet unless she was freed within the next 48 hours.
This story has been viewed 951 times.