BAGHDAD, 14 March 2006 — Iraqi police found four hanged men dangling from electricity pylons in a Baghdad slum yesterday, hours after car bombs and mortars shells ripped through teeming market streets, killing at least 58 people and wounding more than 200. The grim scene of apparent vigilante justice underscored fears Sunday’s bloody assault on a stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr would plunge Iraq into another frenzy of sectarian killing.
Bomb blasts in Baghdad and north of the capital — many of them targeting Iraqi police patrols — killed at least 11 more people yesterday and wounded more than 40. They included a US soldier killed in a roadside bombing in east Baghdad, the military said. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said terrorists bent on igniting a civil war were taking advantage of a vacuum in authority caused by tangled negotiations to form a new government.
“The way in which this bloody act was conducted leaves us with no doubt that the terrorists have targeted this peaceful neighborhood in order to ignite civil strife and stoke the fire of civil war,” Talabani said in a statement. Addressing reporters in the Shiite holy city of Najaf yesterday, Sadr avoided blaming Sunnis for the attacks and appealed for unity. He instead blamed feared terror group Al-Qaeda in Iraq and US forces. “Sunnis and Shiites are not responsible for such acts,” Sadr said. “National unity is required.” Sunni leaders quickly condemned the attack on Sadr City.
Meanwhile, the judge who oversaw the trial of 148 Shiite men accused of plotting to assassinate Saddam Hussein in 1982 said in court yesterday he had personally issued a death warrant for them and insisted it was legal. A second leading defendant said Americans had tortured him. “They attacked the president of the republic and they confessed,” Awad Hamed Al-Bandar, former head of Iraq’s Revolutionary Court, said in testimony before the judges trying him, Saddam and six others for crimes against humanity.
Former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan also testified. He denied involvement and, dismissing the new court as a tool of American occupation, accused US forces of torturing him in custody — a charge the court said it would investigate.
