Bombers in Iraq Target Red Cross and Police Stations
By DEXTER FILKINS and RAYMOND BONNER
Published: October 27, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Monday, Oct. 27 - A series of blasts shook Baghdad early Monday, including a suicide attack on the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Police and U.S. military told the Associated Press that 37 people were killed in the attacks.
An Iraqi police major said the attacker was driving an ambulance and crashed through the security gate. The bomb exploded about 50 feet from the building. Most of the dead appeared to be Iraqis, although at least one Red Cross worker died. Most of the Red Cross staff had not yet arrived for work when the blast went off around 8:30 a.m.
It was the second day of attacks in the capital. On Sunday, an American colonel was killed and at least 16 people were wounded when a barrage of air-to-ground missiles from a homemade launching pad slammed into a highly protected hotel where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was staying.
The explosion at the Red Cross building left a crater six feet deep and heavily damaged other buildings on both sides of the street. It shattered windows in buildings a mile away.
Two other blasts struck police stations, one in southwest Baghdad that killed two people and a suicide bomber and the other in the northern part of the city.
The Red Cross had reduced its staff in Iraq after the devastating bombing of the United Nations headquarters here in August. The staff that remained had moved their offices to the middle of their four-story concrete building in the center of the city.
Iraqi witnesses said they saw an Iraqi ambulance and a small civilian car speeding down a narrow alleyway leading to the building's parking lot about 8:30 a.m. ``The cars were racing and then the ambulance sped up and drove inside the gate,'' said Rawzi Jamar, who runs a cigarette stand about 1,000 yards from the building.
The charred remains of several cars could be seen in the water-soacked parking lot.
American military officials said they did not believe Mr. Wolfowitz was the target of the Sunday attack, but they called the attack carefully planned.
One official said that the military had specific intelligence of an imminent attack on the hotel, the Rashid, where senior personnel of the American occupation live and eat, but that no special precautions had been taken.
Mr. Wolfowitz, who arrived here on Friday for brief visit, was one floor above where one of the rockets hit, officials said; he was not hurt.
Officials said the wounded included five American soldiers, seven American civilians working in various Iraqi ministries as part of the American-led effort to rebuild Iraq, and four non-American civilians. The identity of the dead colonel was not immediately released.
The attack, which officials suggested was probably carried out by men loyal to Saddam Hussein, blasted balconies off two rooms and shattered windows elsewhere in the hotel. American military officials said the attack might have been planned as many as two months in advance and involved some surveillance and rehearsal.
For that reason, they said, it was unlikely that Mr. Wolfowitz was a target. His visit was not announced in advance.
Nonetheless, a senior military official said, ``We knew this was coming.'' The official, speaking on the condition that he not be identified, declined to give details, but said several precautionary security measures could have been taken, including moving Mr. Wolfowitz and his delegation out of the hotel, increasing the security alert and increasing patrols around the hotel. None of those things happened, he said.
The missiles were launched from an improvised multirocket platform, a homemade version of the Katyusha system used by Russia, military officials said. The Irish Republican Army has used similar systems.
The launcher was hidden in a blue trailer made to resemble a mobile electricity generator, a ubiquitous item in Baghdad, where electrical service is unreliable. In the quiet of early Sunday morning, a white passenger vehicle towed the trailer down a major street that runs between the hotel and a large park. It was then unhitched at a cloverleaf that had been closed by the Americans for security reasons. The car pulled away. Soon after, at 6:08 a.m., 8 to 10 missiles thudded into the hotel, about 450 yards away, officials said. |
