Police say a bicycle laden with explosives killed two civilians and wounded 19 at a busy market north of Baghdad. Some of the wounded were badly hurt.
A police officer says the bicycle was left near an Iraqi military truck parked at the main market in Taji, a small town 20km north of Baghdad.
The officer says soldiers who had arrived in the truck were patrolling the market on foot at a busy time yesterday morning when the blast went off. The truck was badly damaged by the blast.
PHOTO: AFP
SUSPECTS ARRESTED
Meanwhile, police arrested eight suspects yesterday in search of accomplices of a female suicide bomber who killed 22 people on Monday, security sources said.
The bomber blew herself up in a crowd near a police station in Balad Ruz in Diyala Province, 57km northeast of Baghdad, the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency reported.
Police officers had gathered to celebrate at the home of a police commissioner who had been released from US custody after being detained for allegedly cooperating with the Mehdi Army.
Eleven policemen were among the 22 fatalities, while 33 civilians were injured.
Two police captains and three lieutenant colonels were among the dead, said a police officer who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
The police commissioner, Adnan Shukr al-Timimi, had invited friends and relatives to a banquet, and his parents and two children were among the dead, a hospital official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
A report by the Monitor of Constitutional Freedom and Bill of Rights, a Baghdad-based group, said women embittered by the loss of their husbands and children in acts of violence are potential suicide bombers.
“One million widows and hundred of thousands of divorcees are left without an economically secure living,” the report said.
MARGINALIZED WOMEN
“This is made more difficult by onerous procedures to receive social welfare, which is not adequate enough to include the large numbers of marginalized women,” the report said.
Also on Monday, a double car bombing struck a busy commercial district in Baghdad, killing 13 people in one of the deadliest attacks in the capital in weeks.
Iraqi officials said the explosives-laden cars were parked between a passport office and a courthouse when they blew up almost simultaneously in Karradah,a mainly Shiite neighborhood. Police and an Interior Ministry official said the dead were civilians.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to release the information, said 35 people were wounded and dozens of cars were burned or damaged in the attack.
The US military blamed the Baghdad attacks on al-Qaeda in Iraq.
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