- BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide
car bombing in the heart of Baghdad killed at least 13 people on Monday,
including five foreign contractors working for Iraq's U.S.-led authorities,
whose convoy was the apparent target.
-
- It was the second suicide bombing in the Iraqi capital
in 24 hours and coincided with a wave of assassinations aimed at the new
interim government appointed to take over from the U.S.-British occupation
authorities on June 30.
-
- Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said five foreign
workers had been killed in the morning rush-hour attack, which devastated
a busy street and ripped the front off one building.
-
- "The terrorists are trying to prevent the transfer
of power and sovereignty on June 30," Allawi told a news conference.
-
- Hospital officials said at least eight other people had
been killed and dozens wounded, many of them with severe burns or limbs
torn off by the blast near Tahrir (Liberation) Square.
-
- The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) employs
thousands of contractors from many nations. Some are involved in reconstruction
projects, others are private security guards.
-
- Two Iraqi policemen at the scene said the blast had killed
five people in one CPA vehicle which was reduced to a charred wreck. A
police source said a bomber in a red four-wheel-drive vehicle had set off
the explosion, which he said hit two other CPA vehicles and wounded five
or six occupants.
-
- Crowds of shocked and angry Iraqis swarmed over the area,
some trying to pull survivors from the damaged building before police fired
in the air to clear a path for emergency vehicles.
-
- Dozens of people hammered on two of the CPA vehicles
caught in the blast, chanting "America is the enemy of God,"
and later set fire to their fuel tanks.
-
- U.S. tanks and other military vehicles escorted by soldiers
on foot sealed off the area with razor wire. Truckloads of American troops
in riot gear arrived to control the crowds.
-
- On Sunday a suicide car bombing killed up to 12 Iraqis
near a U.S.-Iraqi base in Baghdad and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil
servant and a university professor. A top foreign ministry official was
assassinated the previous day.
-
- Senior U.S. officials warned that such attacks would
continue and Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged to do "everything
we can to defeat this insurgency."
-
- Powell acknowledged the difficulty of providing security
for Iraq's new leaders. "It is going to be a dangerous period and
these murderers have to be defeated," he said.
-
- POLITICAL MOTIVE
-
- Last month, a suicide bombing killed Izzedin Salim, the
head of Iraq's now-dissolved Governing Council, and another council member
survived an ambush south of the capital.
-
- U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said
the attacks were an attempt "to shake the will of the new interim
government" in the run-up to the June 30 handover.
-
- "We know that the period leading up to sovereignty
and indeed the period immediately after sovereignty is likely to be one
in which the terrorists and the Saddam loyalists enhance their efforts
at violence," she said.
-
- Interim President Ghazi Yawar described the assassinations
as "random killings" and said violence would diminish once Iraq
had rebuilt its own security forces.
-
- Yawar said there were no plans to destroy Abu Ghraib
prison despite an offer by President Bush to tear down the jail where some
Americans abused Iraqi prisoners.
-
- The U.S. military moved more prisoners from Abu Ghraib
on Monday as part of a declared program to reduce numbers there to around
2,000 by the June 30 handover.
-
-
- Witnesses said three buses left the jail on the outskirts
of Baghdad. The military had said 585 prisoners would be freed on Monday.
-
- The International Committee of the Red Cross, which described
abuses at Abu Ghraib in a report leaked in May, said last week the number
of detainees there had fallen to 3,291 this month from 6,527 in March.
The ICRC said it did not know how many had been freed and how many transferred
elsewhere.
-
- Yawar said the prison, already notorious as a place of
torture and killing under Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), had cost more
than $100 million and such money should not be wasted.
-
- "We need every single dollar we have in order to
rebuild our country instead of demolishing and rebuilding," he said.
-
- Yawar said the new Iraqi government would take control
of the Abu Ghraib prison after June 30.
-
- Copyright © 2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited
without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable
for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance
thereon.
-
- http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=586&ncid=
586&e=2&u=/nm/20040614/wl_nm/iraq_dc
-
|
