TUZ KHURMATU (Iraq), July 7: A suicide truck bomber killed at least 105 people and demolished dozens of homes and shops in a northern Iraqi village on Saturday, police and medics said.
Ambulances and private cars ferried dozens of bloodied corpses and wounded civilians to clinics in the nearby town of Tuz Khurmatu and the provincial capital Kirkuk, where desperate relatives waited for news of the missing.
Officials were stunned by the scale of the blast, which devastated the main market in Emerli, a small rural community of people from the Turkmen minority.
“I heard the cries of my child, then I heard nothing else until I woke in hospital,” sobbed middle-aged housewife Sukaina Abdul Razak, whose clay brick home collapsed when the blast ripped through the village.
“I don’t know the fate of my husband and my family,” she told AFP in Kirkuk’s crowded emergency room.
Shrapnel from the blast killed shoppers hundreds of metres from its epicentre, wounded grocer Hussein Abu Al Hussein Akbar Aziz said in Kirkuk.
“We have never seen an attack like that in Emerli. The whole village was shrouded in smoke and dust,” he said, grimacing from a leg injury.
Lt-Col Saman Hamid, commander of the security coordination centre in Tuz Khurmatu, told AFP: “105 Iraqis were killed and five are missing, we have registered their names. There are more than 250 wounded.” The toll was confirmed by Dr Wissam Abdullah, director of the main local hospital.
The chief local civilian administrator, Hamad Rasheed, said he had seen reports that up to 125 people could be confirmed dead after rescuers finished digging through the rubble of dozens of buildings.
Another car bomb attack against a military checkpoint in Baghdad killed at least three people and wounded 10, medics at the city’s Ibn Nafees hospital said. A defence official said up to six people could have been killed.
The bombings came as the US military announced the deaths of eight soldiers over the previous two days and the British of two.—AFP
