- BAGHDAD (Reuters) -- Insurgents
detonated three car bombs near a U.S. military convoy in Baghdad Thursday,
killing 41 people, 34 of them children, and wounding scores.
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- In two other attacks, a suicide bomber blew up his vehicle
near a U.S. checkpoint outside the capital, killing two policemen and a
U.S. soldier, and a car bomb killed four people in the restive northern
Iraq town of Tal Afar.
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- The Baghdad blasts coincided with crowds gathering to
celebrate the opening of a new sewage plant. It was not clear if the event
or a U.S. convoy passing nearby was the target.
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- The first explosion was followed by two more that struck
those who rushed to the aid of the initial victims.
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- Ten U.S. soldiers were wounded in the attack, two of
them seriously, the military said. Iraq's Health ministry confirmed 41
dead and 139 wounded, the vast majority children.
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- Instability is steadily mounting just weeks before the
U.S. presidential election in November and four months before Iraq is due
to hold its own nationwide polls. Attacks on American troops have risen
to around 80 a day from 40 a month ago.
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- Doctors at Yarmouk hospital struggled to treat the flood
of victims, as pools of blood formed on the floor.
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- One boy lay swathed in bandages on a stretcher, his severed
leg on a table beside him. Others were scarred by shrapnel, their clothes
blown off by the force of the explosion.
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- The attack gouged a crater in the road and wrecked a
dozen burned-out cars and a bus. U.S. troops sealed off the area with tanks,
and helicopters circled overhead.
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- POLICE AND SOLDIERS DEAD
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- Hours earlier, a suicide bomber had killed two Iraqi
police and a U.S. soldier by blowing up his car near a U.S. checkpoint
at a crowded intersection in Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad. Around 60
people, including women and children, were wounded.
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- Another soldier was killed when a rocket hit a U.S. logistics
base near Baghdad. The confirmed deaths of the two soldiers raised to at
least 802 the number of U.S. troops killed in action since the start of
the war.
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- In northern Iraq, another car bomb blew up near an Iraqi
police convoy in the center of Tal Afar, a rebellious town close to the
Syrian border. Hospital officials said four civilians had been killed and
16 wounded. Four policemen were also hurt.
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- In rebel-held Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad,
U.S. forces destroyed a building they said was being used by fighters loyal
to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose group is threatening to behead a British
hostage.
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- The strike was the latest in a series of almost daily
attacks in Falluja intended to crush Zarqawi's network, which has claimed
responsibility for many of Iraq's bloodiest suicide bombings and the killings
of foreign captives.
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- Zarqawi's group beheaded Americans Eugene Armstrong and
Jack Hensley this month after U.S. forces and the Iraqi government refused
to release women prisoners.
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- BRITISH HOSTAGE
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- The group says it will also kill the Briton Kenneth Bigley,
62, who was snatched along with the American pair.
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- Wednesday, footage was released showing a haggard Bigley
squatting chained in a cage, pleading for his life.
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- In a barely audible voice, Bigley said British Prime
Minister Tony Blair was not doing enough to free him: "Tony Blair
is a liar. He doesn't care about me. I'm just one person."
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- Blair has said Britain will not negotiate with the kidnappers,
but told reporters on Wednesday: "They've made no attempt to have
any contact with us at all. If they did make contact, it would be something
we would immediately respond to."
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- Separately, a militant group said it had seized 10 people,
including two Indonesian women, working for an electronics firm in Iraq,
Al Jazeera television reported.
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- Lebanon said three of its nationals had been seized.
It was not clear if this was the same incident.
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- The U.S. military says it has sound intelligence that
Zarqawi and his followers are hiding out in Falluja, although residents
say the U.S. strikes regularly hit civilians.
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- U.S. marines pulled out of the city after weeks of fighting
in April that killed hundreds of Iraqis, and handed over responsibility
for security to an Iraqi force that has since collapsed. The city is now
run by insurgents.
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- The U.S. military says that with the help of Iraqi forces
it will retake rebel strongholds such as Falluja, Ramadi, Samarra and the
Baghdad neighborhoods of Sadr City and Haifa Street by December so elections
can go ahead as planned a month later.
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