Series of Blasts Kill at Least 30 in Baghdad
A series of blasts shook Baghdad early today, including a suicide attack on the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross and bombings at five Iraqi police stations that punctuated two days of bloody violence in this capital city.
Iraq's police chief and deputy interior minister, Ahmad Ibrahim, said at a news conference that 34 people were killed and 224 were wounded in the attacks. He said 26 of the dead were civilians and eight were police. Sixty-five policemen and 159 civilians were wounded in the blasts, he said.
The attacks took place in a condensed time period - between 8:30 and 10:15 a.m. local time - leading law enforcement officials to believe they were part of a highly coordinated attack that came at the outset of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. There was a strong suspicion that foreigners were involved, and American and Iraqi officials referred to a ``new element'' being responsible for the bombings.
The officials differentiated between today's attacks and one on Sunday against a highly protected hotel where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was staying, which they attribute to loyalists to the former regime of Saddam Hussein.
One of the five police station attacks was foiled when the attacker was shot but not killed. According to American and Iraqi officials, he identified himself as Syrian and was carrying Syrian identification.
One of the police attacks succeeded, officials said, in part because the bomber was driving a police vehicle and wearing a police uniform.
The Red Cross headquarters was lightly protected; most potential targets in Baghdad have a security cordon of truck barricades or cement walls, but the Red Cross building was blocked by just some oil drums filled with sand and some barbed wire.
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.
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.
One of the 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 bodies, could be seen in the water-soaked parking lot. Body parts were scattered, and fires burned inside cars.
In the attack on Sunday, an American colonel was killed and at least 16 people were wounded when a barrage of missiles from a homemade launching pad slammed into a highly protected hotel. 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.
nytimes.com |
