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.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS