Three suicide bombers attacked Baghdad's Green Zone government compound yesterday but only two bystanders were killed and police shot and captured one of the bombers before he could set off his explosives.
Police said the attack, claimed by al-Qaeda's Iraq wing, involved a car bomber followed up by two bombers on foot. The target was a checkpoint guarded by Iraqi troops and police and used by civilians arriving for work at the complex.
Doctors at the city's Yarmouk hospital said they had seen two bodies from the attack and five people were wounded -- among them, it appeared, the third bomber who failed in his mission and whose capture could yield important intelligence.
"We felt a strong blast. I came out and saw a car blown up," policeman Haider Abdel Hussein said.
Another officer said he believed the attackers used a police car.
The US military said in a statement that after the car bomb "a suicide bomber detonated himself and the other suicide bomber tried to run away from the scene. Iraqi police shot the man and were evacuating him when they discovered the vest."
The coordinated attacks occurred one day after a horrific blast at a poor east Baghdad neighborhood that killed 18 children and teenagers who had swarmed around a US Humvee to get candy and toys. Up to 27 people died in the Wednesday blast -- including one US soldier.
It is rare for forces in Iraq to capture people they know are involved in suicide bombing and they will be anxious to gather what intelligence they can -- though it is equally likely the bomber knows little of the men who sent him on his mission.
Most suicide bombers are believed to be young men, many of them foreign, whose religious allegiance to the likes of al-Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has been allied to the insurgency among Iraq's Sunni Arab minority which appears to be directed in part by loyalists from former president Saddam Hussein's secular Baathist regime.
The suicide explosions were followed by a mortar attack on the Green Zone, which formerly housed Saddam's main presidential palaces, police said.
The attack came on a new July 14 public holiday, announced last month and marking the 1958 revolution that overthrew the British-installed monarchy and gave Iraq its first taste of real independence from foreign domination.
The leader of the coup d'etat which killed the king, Abdelkarim Kassem, later survived an assassination attempt by a young Saddam and a new holiday honoring him is likely to anger Saddam's Baathist followers.
Saddam's Baath party had instead marked the July 17 anniversary of the 1968 putsch which brought it to power.
Near Kirkuk, where ethnic tensions between Arabs and Kurds are running high, gunmen killed three policemen and wounded two when they shot at their car in the town of Rashad. In Kirkuk itself an Iraqi soldier was killed and a female comrade wounded by gunmen in car.
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