BAGHDAD, May 12: A car bomb explosion in Baghdad on Thursday killed 15 people and wounded more than 80, bringing the death toll from attacks since the new Iraqi government took office at the start of the month to well over 400. Violence continued to overshadow Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari’s efforts at seizing the political initiative and American hopes of bringing peace to the country, with the deaths of four US marines raising to 19 the number of US servicemen killed since Saturday.
The total number of US servicemen killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion now stands at 1,609. A suicide bomber killed 15, including them women, and wounded at least 84 in the busy, ethnically mixed eastern Jadida district of the capital, police and hospital sources said.
At least eight cars and a bus were caught in the blast, which blew out windows and storefronts and sent street vendors’ stalls flying. Twisted bodies in ripped clothes were wheeled away on the peddlers’ carts by residents as thick black smoke billowed into the sky.
Medics and police extracted charred bodies from the bus. When US forces who arrived after the blast fired warning shots into the air to disperse the crowd, bystanders threw stones at them, witnesses said.
A second bomb, planted in a parked car, exploded three hours later as a US military convoy drove by, wounding five Iraqi civilians in the western Khadra district, an interior ministry official said.
Three bombs went off in the ethnic tinderbox of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, killing one civilian and wounding five, including a policeman. Two explosions were in predominantly Kurdish areas, said police chief General Turhan Yusef. In further unrest, a general in Iraq’s newly-formed army and an interior ministry police colonel were shot dead in separate incidents in Baghdad, security officials said.
Al Qaeda frontman in Iraq Abu Musab al Zarqawi claimed responsibility for killing the colonel in a statement posted on the Internet. At least six more people were killed in clashes with guerillas in northern Iraq. An additional two Iraqi soldiers were killed in a bomb blast in Samarra.—AFP
