Bombings in Baghdad Aim at Diplomatic Locations

Bombings in Baghdad Aim at Diplomatic Locations
By ROD NORDLAND and RIYADH MOHAMMED
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: April 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/world/middleeast/05iraq.html?hp


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.