Suicide car bomb kills 13 in Baghdad

By LIN NOUEIHED

BAGHDAD - A suicide car bomb blast in a busy Baghdad street yesterday killed five contractors, including two Britons, working for the US-led authority who were in a passing convoy, an American official said.

The blast killed at least eight others.

A police source said the blast, detonated by a suicide bomber driving a red four-wheel-drive vehicle, hit three Coalition Provisional Authority vehicles, killing five of their occupants and wounding five or six.

The source said the casualties from the convoy had been taken inside the sprawling "Green Zone" compound that houses the authority's headquarters.

A United States military spokesman said he had heard no reports of coalition casualties.

It was not immediately clear if civilian contractors working for the authority could have been the target.

Officials at two hospitals said they had received eight dead and dozens of wounded, many with limbs blown off or severe burns after the blast near Tahrir (Liberation) Square.

It was the second suicide car bombing in the Iraqi capital in as many days and coincided with a wave of assassinations aimed at the new interim government appointed to take over from the US-British occupation authorities on June 30.

Crowds of shocked and angry Iraqis swarmed over the area, some trying to pull survivors from the damaged building before police fired in the air to clear a path for emergency vehicles.

The blast hurled one four-wheel-drive vehicle off the road, reducing it to a charred wreck.

Dozens of people hammered on two other damaged four-wheel-drive vehicles, chanting: "America is the enemy of God", and later set fire to their fuel tanks.

On Sunday a suicide car bombing killed up to 12 Iraqis near a US-Iraqi base in Baghdad and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil servant and a university professor.

A top foreign ministry official was assassinated the previous day.

Senior US officials warned that such attacks would continue and Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged to do "everything we can to defeat this insurgency".

Powell acknowledged the difficulty of providing security for Iraq's new leaders.

"It is going to be a dangerous period and these murderers have to be defeated," he said. "We're moving forward, and we are going to stay there with our 138,000 troops."

Last month, a suicide bombing killed Izzedin Salim, the head of Iraq's now-dissolved Governing Council, and another council member survived an ambush south of the capital.

US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the attacks were an attempt "to shake the will of the new interim government" in the run-up to the handover.

"We know that the period leading up to sovereignty and indeed the period immediately after sovereignty is likely to be one in which the terrorists and the Saddam loyalists enhance their efforts at violence," she said.

Interim President Ghazi Yawar described the assassinations as random killings and said violence would diminish once Iraq had rebuilt its own security forces.

Yawar said there were no plans to destroy Abu Ghraib prison despite an offer by US President George W. Bush to tear it down.

The US military moved more prisoners from the prison yesterday as part of a declared programme to reduce numbers there to around 2000 by the handover.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which described abuses at Abu Ghraib in a report leaked last month, said last week that the number of detainees there had fallen to 3291 this month from 6527 in March.

The ICRC said it did not know how many had been freed and how many transferred elsewhere.

Yawar said the prison, already notorious as a place of torture and killing under Saddam Hussein, had cost more than US$100 million ($160 million) and such money should not be wasted.

"We need every single dollar we have in order to rebuild our country instead of demolishing and rebuilding."

- REUTERS

The toll

In the past four weeks 106 people have been killed by bombers:

June 13 - A suicide car bomber kills up to 12 Iraqis, including four policemen, near a US-Iraqi base in Baghdad.

June 8 - A car bomb explodes in the centre of the northern town of Mosul. At least nine Iraqis are killed and 25 wounded.

June 1 - A suicide car bomber blows himself up at a US military base north of Baghdad, killing at least 11 Iraqis and wounding 20 others and two American soldiers.

May 17 - A suicide car bomb in Baghdad kills the head of Iraq's Governing Council, Abdul Zahra Othman Mohammad, a Shi'ite Muslim also known as Izzedin Salim, dealing a major blow to the coalition.

April 21 - Suicide bombers kill 73 people, including 17 children, in co-ordinated blasts at three police stations in Basra and at the police academy in nearby Zubeir. Ninety-four people are wounded.

Herald Feature: Iraq