- The Pentagon admitted last night that the explosion which
killed 22 people and injured 72 in an army mess tent at Mosul airport on
Tuesday was probably caused by a suicide bomber.
-
- General Richard Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs
of staff, told reporters that it appeared to have been caused by "an
improvised explosive device worn by an attacker".
-
- "We have had a suicide bomber apparently strap something
to his body... and go into a dining hall. We know how difficult this is
to prevent... people bent on suicide," he said.
-
- Earlier ABC news reported that remnants of the attacker's
torso and a suicide vest had been found as forensic scientists and FBI
agents searched the debris in the mess tent at Camp Merez, on the edge
of the airport south-west of the city.
-
- US officials originally suggested that it had been hit
by a rocket or a mortar shell fired outside the base.
-
- But the report of a preliminary investigation released
last night said that the evidence found at the site "includes components
normally associated with improvised explosive devices. There was no physical
evidence of a rocket, mortar, or other type of indirect fire weapon."
-
- This suggested that there had been a major security breach
at the base.
-
- Earlier this year, the Guardian was told that Iraqi workers
were smuggling weapons - mostly machine guns and pistols - out of the camp
and selling them to insurgent groups in the city.
-
- At the time, army officers dismissed the claim, insisting
that the screening of Iraqi employees would filter out potential threats.
-
- Yesterday, US troops made security sweeps through suspected
rebel districts of Mosul and enforced a curfew. With jets swooping overhead,
tanks and armoured cars pushed through residential areas in the south east
and north west of the city, local people said.
-
- Five bridges across the Tigris were sealed on the orders
of the city governor, and most shops and businesses remained closed for
fear of a growth in the violence, which is threatening to destabilise Iraq's
third largest city before the election on January 30.
-
- "We are pursuing offensive operations against specific
targets, objectives in known hostile locations," a US officer in the
city said. "We are determined not to let the terrorists get the upper
hand and stop people from exercising their right to vote."
-
- He said several arrests had been made.
-
- Witnesses said the troops had raided a number of "family
homes" and this was antagonising the community.
-
- "The Americans are just making a show of strength,
and scaring people more," Mohammed al-Feisal, a shopkeeper in the
west of the city, said on the phone. "As usual they don't really understand
what has hit them."
-
- The blast victims had been gathered for lunch in a big
mess tent.
-
- "A fireball enveloped the top of the tent, and pellet-sized
shrapnel sprayed into the men," wrote Jeremy Redmon of the Richmond
Times-Dispatch, an embedded journalist with US units at the camp.
-
- The dead were 18 Americans - 14 service personnel and
four civilian contract workers - and four Iraqis; 51 of the 72 wounded
were US military personnel and the remainder were "American civilians,
Iraqi troops, and other foreigners", the US military command said.
-
- Military sources in Baghdad said it could take days,
and "some exhaustive forensic work", before a definitive picture
of what had happened emerged.
-
- The Sunni militant group Ansar al-Sunna, which claimed
responsibility, said in an internet statement that a suicide bomber had
carried out the attack.
-
- Yesterday another message purporting to be by the group
said the bomber had been a 24-year-old man from Mosul, who worked at the
base for two months.
-
- "Whatever the cause of the blast, it appears to
have exposed once again the vulnerability of US forces in Iraq to a well-armed,
determined and skilful insurgency," a western security adviser training
Iraqi security forces in Mosul said.
-
- "It also raises a host of nightmarish issues about
threats the camps face and about how to stop militants from infiltrating
bases where newly trained Iraqi forces and staff must by necessity go if
the Americans can ever go home."
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- * Nine people were killed and 13 wounded yesterday when
a suicide bomber rammed a car into an Iraqi forces checkpoint south of
Baghdad, a national guard officer told Reuters.
-
- He said the attacker drove his vehicle at high speed
into the checkpoint, on the northeastern entrance to the town of Latifiya.
National guards and police as well as civilians were among the dead.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1379004,00.html
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