Baghdad car bomb kills five

11.00pm

BAGHDAD - The three children, blood and dirt on their school uniforms, were briefly relieved when told their mother had survived a car bomb that turned their Baghdad neighbourhood into a trail of charred bodies and twisted metal.

Four guards died but the children's neighbour, a deputy interior minister, survived Saturday's blast outside his home.

"They told us Mum is OK. She is just wounded," said the eldest child, a girl of about 12, as she stood close to comfort her shocked brother and sister. All three suffered minor cuts and bruises from the blast on what began as a normal school day.

Their mother, though, was not so fortunate. Neighbours had in fact waited before breaking the painful news: their mother was among the five dead who were laid out in blankets nearby.

The bomb exploded just outside the home of General Abdel Jabar al-Shaikli, a deputy interior minister, who was in stable condition in hospital after what was apparently the latest attack by insurgents on US-backed Iraqi officials.

The explosion also killed four Iraqi guards from the US-run Force Protection Service and left a trail of destruction that rattled the neighbourhood at 8am, as residents were leaving home to go to work.

"I felt my house shaking and I thought it was going to collapse," said Rasoul Zayzan, a policeman who lives in the street where the blast occurred. "There was smoke everywhere."

More than an hour after the blast, Iraqi police were still picking up body parts and putting them in plastic bags for burial.

The blast spared no one and nothing in the immediate area. A bird crushed by the blast lay beside the wheel of an ambulance a few feet from a collapsed swing seat in al-Shaikhly's garden. Thick black smoke poured into the air and half a dozen cars were ablaze.

"We will not keep quiet. We will keep investigating until we find who was responsible for this ugly crime," Interior Minister Samir Sumaidi told reporters as he visited the site.

US Captain Brian O'Malley said the military had not ruled out the possibility that the blast was a suicide attack.

Stunned residents stood near their houses as US soldiers called in reinforcements to secure the site, just a few hundred metres from the American military's Camp Ironhorse.

An elderly woman ran out of her house looking up at the sky and screaming "we can only complain to you Allah, nobody else", perhaps venting frustration at more than a year of violence since the US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein.

Another woman walked quickly over the black soot from the blast that covered the street. "They told us there are dead people, dead children," she yelled.

One policeman pointed to blood high on a wall. "Look how far the dead Iraqi policemen were thrown by the bomb," he said.

At the foot of the wall lay the corpse of the three children's mother.

A bloodied man, badly wounded, his clothes torn by the blast, was lifted on to a ute and driven away.

Asked if he was concerned that such a deadly blast could kill five people so close to an American base, O'Malley said "We need the help of all the Iraqi people to let us know when stuff like this is happening."

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq