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BAGHDAD, May 29: A car bomb exploded outside a Shia prayer hall in southwestern Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 21 people and wounding 53 according to medical officials, shortly after another attack killed 12.
Survivors of the explosion told Yarmuk hospital officials that the car exploded outside the al-Imma Husseiniya, a Shia prayer hall in the mixed Sunni-Shiite neighbourhood of Amil.
The blast came less than an hour after a suicide car bomb exploded in a busy Baghdad square near a police patrol on Tuesday, killing at least 12 people.
The first bomber was targeting a passing police patrol and killed at least one officer and wounded two others in the crowded Tayaran Square. Al-Kindi hospital reported receiving 12 dead, including a woman, and 33 wounded.
KIDNAPPED: Gunmen in Iraqi police uniforms kidnapped five Britons — a computer expert and his four bodyguards — from a finance ministry building in Baghdad on Tuesday, officials said.
The daylight raid came as the US military confirmed 10 GIs were killed on Monday, as the United States marked its annual Memorial Day for fallen troops, making May the deadliest month for American forces this year.
The British government said five British nationals had been kidnapped, while the Canadian security firm Garda World confirmed that the captives were four Britons employed as a security detail and their client.
“We can confirm that a group of five British nationals were abducted in an incident at the finance ministry in central Baghdad,” said a British foreign ministry spokeswoman, adding that the attack happened at 11:40 am local time.
“Officials from our embassy are in urgent contact with the Iraqi authorities to try to establish the facts and to secure a swift resolution,” she said.
The men were snatched when police vehicles surrounded a finance ministry office on Palestine Street in the heart of Baghdad and a squad of men wearing police uniforms stormed the building, an Iraqi official said.
The four were taken away at gunpoint and driven off by men in the recently issued newly designed fatigues of the National Police, a heavily armed interior ministry paramilitary unit, he added.
Western security contractors in Baghdad described the hostages as a foreign contractor training Iraqi finance ministry employees computer skills and his four man security details.—AFP
