BAGHDAD, 5 April 2005 — A suicide car bomber struck yesterday near the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, blowing up only himself, said witnesses. The prison had been attacked Saturday by a large group of insurgents in an assault that killed at least one insurgent and resulted in injury to more than 80 people, the US military said yesterday.

An estimated 50 insurgents, 23 US soldiers and 13 inmates were injured during the “well coordinated” nighttime attack with small arms, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at the prison. Seven of the US soldiers required hospitalization. Initially, the military had said 44 US personnel and a dozen inmates had been injured in the raid.

An Iraqi official said 34 insurgents were arrested by Iraqi forces in the northern province of Ninevah. A US official said five people were arrested near Bayji in northwestern Iraq, where an explosive device killed a US soldier on Sunday.

A spokesman at a US base in Tikrit said that one of the suspects was caught testing a roadside bomb. Rocket-propelled grenades and material for making bombs were confiscated, the officer said.

Another US soldier was reported killed and one soldier wounded by terrorist small arms fire in Tal Afar, west of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq. The military said the incident occurred Saturday, and that the wounded soldier had been treated at a field hospital.

Meanwhile, a meeting of Sunnis in Baghdad yesterday to propose a candidate for vice president in Iraq’s next coalition government ended in shouts and curses, underlining the divisions among the community after its loss of power.

“We must be tough, Kurds and Shiites want everything!” shouted one of those in attendance as they took turns to speak.

Members of the so-called National Front met one day after the newly elected Parliament chose fellow Sunni Hajim Al-Hassani as speaker, following an objection by Shiites over another controversial candidate they had proposed. The Sunnis, who largely boycotted the elections, are being offered the speakership, one of the vice president posts and four to six Cabinet posts in the prospective coalition government.

Shiites and Kurds who dominated the January elections but are still trying to form a government, are trying to reach out to the embittered community, which is accused of leading the relentless insurgency.

Parliament was set to meet again tomorrow to try to elect a presidency council, made up of a vice president and two deputies.

In Najaf, the head of a charitable organization affiliated to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr said a riot in Camp Bucca prison on April 1 caused US troops to open fire on some of the detainees with rubber bullets wounding an undetermined number of them.

“We condemn these acts and we ask the human rights organizations to intervene quickly,” said Saheb Al-Ameri, secretary-general of the Shahidallah organization.

The US military denied any knowledge of a riot at the camp in southern Iraq, home to 6,054 detainees, since an outbreak on Jan. 31 in which four inmates were killed when prison guards opened fired. The International Committee of the Red Cross contradicted the US denial, saying the riot had been witnessed by one of its delegations.

“There was a riot at Camp Bucca on April 1. An ICRC delegation was there that day on one of its regular prisoner visits and it is now following up the situation,” said Christophe Beney, the head of the ICRC’s Baghdad delegation.

— With input from agencies