BAGHDAD, July 27: A suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to a Baghdad hospital on Wednesday, killing at least five people and wounding 10, police sources said. They said the bomber attacked security forces at the gate to Numaa hospital in Baghdad’s Athamiya district.

Meanwhile Iraqi commandos have captured an Egyptian said to be an associate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s number two, police sources said on Wednesday. Police named the suspect as Hamdi Tantawi and said he was detained in a raid on a farmhouse near the town of Yusufiya, south of Baghdad. They said Tantawi was suspected of financing insurgent operations in the area.

They said Tantawi was believed to be a lieutenant to Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor regarded as second-in-command to Osama Bin Laden in the Al Qaeda network. Computers, money and weapons were also seized in the raid, the police said.

Wednesday’s operation took place in an area called Al Shakhat, about 40-km south of Baghdad, part of a region referred to as the ‘triangle of death’ by US troops because of the frequency of insurgent attacks. Police said initial interrogations had revealed that Tantawi was responsible for several attacks on Iraqi soldiers, police and civilians in the area. The US military and the Iraqi government were not immediately available to comment on the arrest.

In recent months, Iraqi commandos and US forces have detained many said to be senior associates of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of a group called Al Qaeda in Iraq, an offshoot allied to Bin Laden.—Reuters