At least 20 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded in twin bomb attacks yesterday in Iraq’s Anbar province, police said.
The attack appeared to target senior officials in western Iraq, and the governor of Anbar Province was taken to hospital after the second bombing.
Al-Iraqiya state television initially reported that Qassim Mohammed, governor of the mainly Sunni Arab province west of Baghdad, was killed in the attacks near the provincial government headquarters in Ramadi, the provincial capital.
PHOTO: REUTERS
But Deputy Governor Hikmet Khalaf later said in a phone call that Mohammed was still alive and had been taken to hospital.
Jassim Mohammed, who heads the Anbar provincial council, also said the governor was alive. State TV later ran a similar report from the provincial council head.
State TV also said a member of the provincial council and the deputy police commander had been killed in the blasts.
Police in Ramadi said the attacks took place in quick succession in the city, located 100km west of Baghdad.
Many of those wounded were from Iraqi security forces.
Police Colonel Jabbar Ajaj said the first blast, in which a suicide bomber detonated explosives in a vehicle, was followed shortly afterwards by a second suicide attack, this time carried out by a bomber on foot.
A source at the hospital said that, after the first attack took place near the provincial headquarters, the governor came out from his office to inspect the damage.
Then the second attacker struck.
One of the attackers was a man working as a bodyguard for the governor, Iraqiya reported.
FRENCH AID: Paris has sent a navy ship and aircraft from Reunion Island with some pollution control equipment, but rough seas are spreading the oil spill The operator of a Japanese bulk carrier which ran aground off Mauritius in the Indian Ocean yesterday apologized for a major oil spill, which officials and environmentalists say is creating an ecological disaster, as police prepared to board the ship. The MV Wakashio, operated by Mitsui OSK Lines, struck the reef on Mauritius’ southeast coast on July 25. “We apologize profusely and deeply for the great trouble we have caused,” Mitsui OSK Lines executive vice president Akihiko Ono said at a news conference in Tokyo. The company would “do everything in their power to resolve the issue,” he said. At least 1,000 tonnes of
They stand as eyesores to most passers-by and potential public health risks to authorities, decaying buildings wrapped in tangles of exposed wire, studded with protruding leaky plastic pipes, vegetation billowing from cracks and terraces where particulates from polluted air have accumulated over time. With skyscrapers and ultramodern developments on every side, some of these “nail houses” are also sitting on land worth millions of dollars in Shenzhen’s inferno of a property market, where new-unit and second-hand home prices rival London. In battles over land and development, the nail house phenomenon has become widespread throughout China over the past two decades, with owners
An Italian alpine resort on Friday remained on high alert over fears that a vast chunk of a glacier on the slopes of the Mont Blanc massif could plummet in high temperatures. “No one gets through! No cars, bikes or pedestrians,” was the message at a checkpoint where an automatic barrier and two guards blocked the small road snaking up into a lush valley below the Planpincieux glacier, near the town of Courmayeur and the Italian-French border. The blockade has largely been greeted with contempt by the locals, one of whom said: “It’s a joke.” The huge ice block measuring around 500,000 cubic
SHOW OF SOLIDARITY: The publisher’s ‘Apple Daily’ newspaper has had to raise the number of copies printed from 70,000 to 550,000 to meet a huge surge in demand They have occupied Hong Kong’s central business district, marched by the hundreds of thousands through the territory’s streets and endured tear gas and pepper spray in pitched battles with riot police. Hong Kong’s pro-democracy supporters are now wielding a new protest weapon: their stock-market trading accounts. To show support for Jimmy Lai (黎智英), the publisher and outspoken government critic who was on Monday arrested under the territory’s new national security legislation, Hong Kongers have been piling into shares of his media company Next Digital. The result: a more than 1,100 percent surge in two days that propelled the stock to a seven-year
RSS