Violent Day in Iraq Begins With Liquor Store Bombings
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
Published: December 14, 2007
BAGHDAD — Homemade bombs hit two Baghdad liquor stores early Thursday, and attacks in several other parts of the city killed two people and wounded at least seven others. Eleven more deaths were reported from attacks outside Baghdad, and 19 bodies were found in Baghdad and elsewhere.
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Liquor stores are frequent targets of bombings and other violence by Islamic militants seeking to end the sale of alcohol here. The two bombings occurred within moments of each other, shortly after 6 a.m. The police said they had defused another bomb placed near a third liquor store.
One of those killed on Thursday was an Iraqi contractor working with the American forces, who was killed by gunmen in the relatively upscale Mansour neighborhood, a predominantly Sunni Arab district in western Baghdad. The contractor, whom the police identified as Firas Sadi Hussein al-Bayatti, worked for the Americans in the fortified Green Zone, the officials said.
Another man was killed on Thursday when a car bomb exploded near the Italian Embassy in Baghdad’s Waziriya neighborhood, north of downtown, said an Interior Ministry official.
The car bomb, which was not set right next to the embassy, wounded two Iraqi policemen and three civilians, he said.
Two improvised roadside bombs hit other Baghdad neighborhoods on Thursday but caused no deaths or injuries, the Interior Ministry official said.
The president of a technical college in Baghdad, Dr. Sabah Ahmed al-Hasani, and his daughter suffered serious injuries after gunmen attacked their vehicle at a busy thoroughfare here.
The police in Baghdad also discovered the remains of three men who had gunshot wounds in the head, the ministry official said.
In Diyala Province, a violent region northeast of Baghdad where Sunni Arab militants have tried to gain a foothold, the police in the town of Muqdadiya discovered the bodies of 16 men, several of which had been decapitated.
Also, a roadside bomb near a gas station in the town of Khanaqin killed four people and wounded 10 others late Wednesday evening, and in Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province, gunmen killed a member of a neighborhood committee, a police official there said.
In Hit, a mainly Sunni town near the Euphrates River in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, a suicide bomber driving a food truck blew himself up in a failed attempt to kill the town’s mayor, Sheik Hikmat Abdul-Jabbar al-Goud, Mr. Goud said in a telephone interview. The explosion killed five people, including two of the mayor’s security guards, and wounded 15 others, he said. The mayor said he was not hurt.
On Thursday morning, many of the families of the 27 people killed in a triple car bombing Wednesday in the southern city of Amara transported the remains to a well-known burial ground in Najaf, the Shiite holy city south of Baghdad.
Most of the 20 vehicles that arrived with coffins lashed to their roofs were draped with Iraqi flags, said Hussein Abu Seiba, a gravedigger in Wadi al-Salam cemetery in Najaf, one of the largest Shiite burial grounds in Iraq.
“The wailing of the women accompanying the procession wafted in the area and lasted for a long time,” Mr. Seiba said.
Reservist Is Found Guilty
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif., (AP) — A Marine reservist was found guilty on Thursday of killing an Iraqi soldier while they stood watch together at a guard post in Falluja.
Lance Cpl. Delano Holmes, 22, of Indianapolis was convicted of negligent homicide, but acquitted of the more serious charge of unpremeditated homicide. He was also convicted of making a false official statement in the death of Pvt. Munther Muhammed Hassin on Dec. 31, 2006.
Lance Corporal Holmes was accused of stabbing Private Hassin to death. The lance corporal’s lawyer said that it was an act of self-defense, contending that Private Hassin had opened his cellphone and then lit a cigarette, against rules that forbid the displaying of illuminated objects for fear of attracting sniper fire. The two then began fighting.
Lance Corporal Holmes’s lawyer has said that during the struggle Lance Corporal Holmes felt Private Hassin reaching for his loaded AK-47, so the lance corporal stabbed the Iraqi.
Prosecutors, however, contended that Lance Corporal Holmes killed the soldier and then set up the scene to support his story.
Khalid al-Ansary, Anwar J. Ali and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times |
