Iraqi capital rocked by bombs leaving 30 dead - BBC News

[Yrys]

Iraqi capital rocked by bombs leaving 30 dead

Three car bombs have hit the centre of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad,
in quick succession, killing at least 30 people. The attacks, which
injured more than 200 others, appear to have been aimed at foreign
embassies. The bombings shatter a period of relative calm after last
month's parliamentary elections. No-one has said they organised the
attacks.

The BBC's Jim Muir in Baghdad says the insurgents want to send a
message that Iraq remains very unstable and unsafe. On Saturday,
gunmen killed 25 people believed to be linked to Sunni militias
opposing al-Qaeda in a village south of Baghdad.

Gunshots

Sunday's explosions went off within a few minutes of each other,
shaking the whole of central Baghdad and sending plumes of smoke
into the sky. "I saw children screaming while their mothers held their
hands or clutched them to their chest," one man told the Associated
Press news agency. "Cars were crashing into each other in streets,
trying to find a way to flee."

One bomb struck very near the Iranian embassy, shattering windows
throughout the area. The Egyptian, Syrian and German missions, in the
Mansour district, were also affected. Another bomb struck near the offices
of a leading pro-Iranian political figure, Ahmed Chalabi. Gunshots were
heard as emergency services rushed to the scene.

A spokesman for the political group headed by Mr Chalabi, the Iraqi National
Congress, said that its headquarters close to the Syrian embassy had been
targeted by a suicide car bomber, and that many of its guards and employees
were among the casualties. The authorities in Baghdad say security forces
shot and killed a man before he could detonate a fourth car bomb near the
former Germany embassy, which is now a bank. A number of Iraqi guards
working for foreign missions were among those killed. Egypt said several of
its staff were wounded by shrapnel. Spain said its embassy and the adjacent
German mission were also damaged.

Our correspondent says Sunday's attacks bore all the hallmarks of earlier
bombings, for which the Islamic State in Iraq - the umbrella group for militant
Sunni Islamist insurgents - took responsibility. But the same organisation
vowed to disrupt the general elections in March, which went ahead undeterred.

This was also the first wave of co-ordinated attacks in Baghdad for more than
two months, and the magnitude of each explosion was considerably less than
the massive bombs that struck government targets last year, our correspondent
says. Those attacks - last August, October and December - killed hundreds of
people.

[urlhttp://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/04/04/iraq.explosions/index.html?hpt=T2]Three deadly blasts rock Baghdad[/url] CNN

The Iraqi bridge to stability

 

[Yrys]

Bombings in Baghdad Aim at Diplomatic Locations - NY Times

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi capital echoed with explosions on Sunday, with
three suicide car bombings killing dozens of people around Baghdad.
Other bombs and rockets went off at widely scattered locations,
paralyzing traffic and disrupting communications throughout the city.

An official in the Interior Ministry said there were three suicide bombers
who had targeted the Iranian embassy as well as the residences of the
Egyptian chargé d’affaires and the German ambassador, all in the Mansour
District and nearby on the western side of the city. Officials said that at
least 32 people were killed in all, with dozens more seriously wounded.

Separately, a police official in Kerrada, a neighborhood in eastern Baghdad,
said that a fourth would-be suicide bomber targeted the offices of the
government’s embassy protective services but policemen shot and
wounded the driver before he could detonate his bomb. The police
identified that suspect, who they claimed was on drugs, as an Iraqi —
Ahmed Jassim, 17 — and said he had been driving a Kia minibus carrying
one ton of explosives. Bomb disposal experts worked for several hours to
defuse the bomb.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity in line with their agencies’
policies.

Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, spokesman for the Baghdad Operations Command,
said the car bombers also wore suicide vests. He speculated that the Mar
Yosif Chaldean Catholic church in the Mansour area may have been one of
the intended targets. A spokeswoman for the church, Ann Sami Matloub,
said that the church was packed with Easter worshipers at the time but
was not damaged by the blast. She said that the explosion was so close
that services had to be suspended for a short time until parishioners could
compose themselves.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombings, but Abdul
Kareem al-Thirib, head of the security committee in Baghdad’s provincial
government, blamed them on the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
“They are trying to show that the situation is bad,” he said. “This is a
campaign launched by terrorists against innocent civilians to create chaos, but
the security forces are totally in control of the situation.”

General Atta was critical of local news coverage of the bombings. “Some of the
media had information even before we did, which means they had connections
with the terrorists,” he charged during an interview on state-owned Iraqiya
television. A press release from the Baghdad Operations Command, which is in
charge of security in the capital, said that the other explosions Sunday morning
had included four improvised explosive devices, which killed no one. In addition,
the command said, “two terrorists were killed and another one wounded” when
the car bomb they were rigging in the Sadiya neighborhood in southern Baghdad
exploded prematurely Sunday.

Without giving details, the command said it had arrested those responsible for
launching rockets into the Jadriyah neighborhood of the city.

It was the first major suicide bomb spree in Baghdad since January, when three
downtown hotels were bombed, killing 41 people. On Friday night, gunmen wearing
army uniforms, some posing as American soldiers, killed 25 people. Most of the dead
were members of the Sunni Awakening or Sons of Iraq groups or the Iraqi security
services, in a village just south of Baghdad. In addition, a series of rockets were fired
into the Green Zone on Saturday night, but there were no reports of deaths. Two
mortars were also fired into the Green Zone on Sunday, the Interior Ministry official
said.

Muhammed al-Obaidi and Tim Arango contributed reporting from Baghdad.