Bomb kills 20 in Baghdad, slain cleric mourned

BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber killed up to 20 people at a police recruitment centre in Baghdad on Saturday, while across town an angry crowd of Shi'ite Muslims mourned a senior cleric gunned down by insurgents.

Another bomb killed five and wounded 12 at a police checkpoint on a main highway just south of the city. After dark, two suicide bombers on foot struck a busy street in the centre of another town to the south, killing five people.

The bombings were the worst in Iraq in at least six days, shattering a relative lull in the Sunni Arab insurgency against US forces and the Shi'ite- and Kurdish-led government.

US President George W Bush, whose approval ratings have slid in recent weeks to the lowest levels of his presidency over concern about the war, said in a radio address the best way to honour the nation's dead was to "stay in the fight".

A senior Interior Ministry source said 20 people had been killed by a bomber in an explosive vest who approached the ministry's special forces recruitment centre in the Mansour district of western Baghdad.

Twelve bodies lay under sheets surrounded by wailing relatives in a courtyard at the nearby Yarmuk hospital. A mother tore her black robes in anguished mourning as she ran to the body of her slain son.

Doctors there said they were also treating 21 wounded, many in serious condition. Others may have been treated elsewhere and some bodies may have been collected by families at the scene.

Suicide bombings and car bombs have become the deadliest tactic in violence which has worsened sharply since the elected government took office in April. Police recruits are frequent targets, yet many Iraqi men continue to sign up in the hope of a paying job in a country where work is scarce.

Al Qaeda's Iraq wing claimed responsibility.

In a Shi'ite neighbourhood of Baghdad, thousands of men held aloft the green-shrouded coffin of cleric Kamal al-Din al- Ghoureify, gunned down as he drove to prayers on Friday.

"It is a calamity for the neighbourhood, for Baghdad, for Muslims and for Shi'ites," Ghoureify's weeping brother Abu Hussein told Reuters. "What was his guilt? He was an old man, 70 years old and paralysed. What did he do?"

Ghoureify was a Baghdad representative for Ayatollah Ali al -Sistani, recognised as spiritual leader by much of Iraq's Shi'ite majority. Mourners packed the streets chanting and beating their chests, some brandishing AK-47 rifles, others holding portraits of the slain, turbaned cleric.

"All I want to say is that Sheikh Ghoureify and Dhari Ali al-Fayadh are martyrs, and martyrs live forever in God's eyes," Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari told a special meeting of his ruling Shi'ite political alliance. Fayadh, the oldest member of parliament, was assassinated by gunmen earlier this week.

A senior police officer in Mahmudiya, just south of the capital, said police and civilians were among five dead and 12 wounded when a suicide car bomber struck a police checkpoint on the highway. Doctors treating the wounded at a Baghdad hospital said the bomb was concealed in a vegetable cart.

Ghoureify's funeral cortege was passing through the area when the bomb went off, but was not struck.

Late in the day, when the people of Hilla, 100km south of Baghdad, were enjoying the relative cool of the evening, two bombers in explosive vests blew themselves up in the town centre, killing five people and wounding 20, police and hospital staff said.

In other violence, two police colonels were gunned down in their cars, one in the northern city of Mosul, another in Musayyib, just south of Baghdad.

Two policemen and two civilians were killed when gunmen opened fire on a patrol in the northern city of Kirkuk. Eight people were wounded including three police by a remote control bomb near a patrol in the capital's New Baghdad district.

In a weekly radio address marking the July 4 Independence Day holiday, Bush sought to tap into patriotic feelings, saying troops in Iraq and Afghanistan followed in the footsteps of those who fought in the American Revolution and World War 2.

"We know that the best way to honor the lives that have been given in this struggle is to complete the mission, so we will stay in the fight until the fight is won."

Ghoureify's murder was one of three attacks on prominent Shi'ite targets within 24 hours.

US Marines said they were checking whether they had killed a cousin of Iraq's UN ambassador last week. Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie said Marines shot dead his first cousin's son, Mohammed al-Sumaidaie, an engineering student, during a June 25 raid on his home in Al-Shaikh Hadid, near a US military base at Haditha Dam on the Euphrates River.

The Marines said the allegations "roughly correspond to an incident involving Coalition Forces on that day in that general location" and a probe had been launched.

- REUTERS