Restaurant blast claims 23

2005-06-19 19:01

Baghdad - 23 Iraqis were killed when a suicide bomber wearing an explosives belt blew himself up in a busy Baghdad restaurant popular with police, one of a string of attacks across the country on Sunday.

A total of 32 people were killed in violence on Sunday, according to security sources, underscoring the strength of the insurgency even as US-led forces battled rebels in operations in the west of the country near the Syrian border.

A woman MP was also injured in an attempted assassination, Iraq's deputy parliamentary speaker said, without saying when the incident occurred.

The lunchtime bombing destroyed the Zanbour restaurant located near the heavily-guarded Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad where most US and Iraqi officials live and work.

"There are at least 16 dead, including six policemen, and 29 wounded, among them nine police," an interior ministry official said.

Iraq's fledgling security forces are the prime targets of a relentless campaign of killings and attacks by insurgents that has left thousands dead over the past two years.

The restaurant bombing came on the heels of a car bomb attack on a police convoy near a Shiite mosque in Baghdad in which at least two people were killed and 26 wounded, according to an interior ministry official.

The bomb went off near Husseinyat al-Nuwab mosque on Aden square near the predominantly Shiite district of Kadhimiyah in the north of the capital.

The ministry source said the convoy was most likely to have been the target as the mosque suffered minimal damage. At least five cars were seen ablaze.

Also in Baghdad, two policemen were gunned down as they left their home in the western Al-Iskan neighbourhood for work, said a defense ministry spokesman.

Three Iraqi soldiers were killed and 13 wounded in a suicide car bombing outside a former palace of ousted leader Saddam Hussein in Tikrit now used as a US military base.

Five other people, including two Iraqi contractors and a truck driver, were killed in other incidents in the Tikrit area.

Tikrit, Saddam's hometown north of Baghdad, has seen stepped up car bombings and attacks against Iraqi and US forces in recent months.

Another Iraq was killed and eight wounded when mortar rounds intended for the provincial authority headquarters in Mosul hit a busy commercial street, hospital and security sources said.

Meanwhile, the interior ministry source said seven bodies of Iraqi civilians were found Friday in a trash dump in the capital's Ammariyah neighbourhood.

In Hindiyah, near the central Shiite shrine city of Karbala, gunmen stormed the home of Jasim Mohammed Musalat, a former member of Saddam's banned Baath party, and killed him, said the local authority spokesman.

It was the second attack of its kind in three days in the area. In the previous attack gunmen dressed as Iraqi policemen gunned down another former senior Baathists in the region.

Iraq's majority Shiites, long oppressed under Saddam, have been calling for a ban on all former Baathists returning to government posts. They have also demanded that Saddam's trial and that of his deputies be accelerated.

In the restive area south of Baghdad known as the Triangle of Death, two Iraqis were killed and two others wounded when gunmen sprayed vegetable and fruit vendors with bullets, police said.

The head of Babil province's anti-corruption unit Ahmed Abdelrazaq was wounded in an assassination attempt as he traveled from Hilla to the central Shrine city of Najaf, police said.

Deputy speaker Hussein al-Shahristani said Kurdish female lawmaker Pakiza Mustapha Ahmed was wounded in an assassination attempt, while the brother of another female deputy, Intisar al-Omari, was killed in Mosul.

However, he gave no further details.

- AFP