BAGHDAD, 3 July 2005 — A suicide bomber killed 20 people at a police recruitment center in Baghdad yesterday, while across town an angry crowd of Shiites buried a senior cleric gunned down by insurgents.
Another man blew up a car bomb at a police checkpoint just south of the city, killing five and wounding 12.
The bombings were the worst in Iraq in at least six days, shattering a relative lull in the insurgency against US forces and the Iraqi government.
A senior Interior Ministry source said 20 people had been killed in the Baghdad blast and that the death toll could rise. Twelve bodies lay under sheets surrounded by wailing relatives in a courtyard at the nearby Al-Yarmuk Hospital.
Doctors there said they were also treating 21 wounded, many in serious condition. Others may have been treated elsewhere and some bodies may have been collected by families at the scene.
The Interior Ministry source said the bomber wore an explosive vest beneath civilian clothes when he approached the ministry’s special forces recruitment center in the Mansour district of western Baghdad.
The same recruitment center, near the Green Zone government and diplomatic compound, has been targeted by bombers several times in the past. An Interior Ministry source said recruits had been told to come yesterday, normally a non-working day, in an effort to fox the insurgents and protect the volunteers.
A senior police officer in Mahmudiya, just south of the capital, said police and civilians were among the five dead and 12 wounded when the suicide car bomber crashed into a police checkpoint in the center of town.
Suicide bombings and car bombs have become the deadliest tactic in violence which has worsened sharply since the elected government took office in April. Police recruits are frequent targets, yet many Iraqi men continue to sign up in the hope of a paying job in a country where work is scarce.
Two police colonels were gunned down in their cars in separate incidents, one in the northern city of Mosul, another in Musayyib just south of Baghdad.
In a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, thousands of men held aloft the coffin of cleric Kamaleddin Al-Ghuraifi, gunned down near his mosque as he drove to prayers on Friday. Ghuraifi was a Baghdad representative for Ayatollah Ali Al -Sistani, recognized as the leader of Iraq’s Shiite majority. Mourners packed the streets chanting and beating their chests, some brandishing AK-47 rifles, others holding portraits of the slain, turbaned cleric.
