BAGHDAD, 17 January 2007 — As many as 65 people, including students and teachers, were killed yesterday in the most devastating Iraq attack this year as a suicide bomber and a car bomb wreaked havoc outside a Baghdad university. The massive bombing came just hours after the United Nations said that the raging violence left at least 34,452 people dead last year, an average of 94 killings a day.
Around 100 people were killed yesterday, mostly in Baghdad, but the day’s deadliest attack and the biggest since the start of 2007 came from the twin blasts at the entrance of the renowned Mustansiriyah University in east Baghdad, security officials said. The explosions ripped through dozens of students, teachers and employees of the university as they were heading home at the end of the day, killing 65 people and wounding 138.
The blasts left a number of nearby cars completely burned and many bodies charred in parked vehicles, an AFP photographer at the scene said. The dead and wounded were rushed to city hospitals in bed sheets, blankets, stretchers and a number of pickup trucks. Burned corpses lay on the street, their mobile telephones ringing unanswered.
Founded in the 13th century, Mustansiriyah University was attended by deposed dictator Saddam Hussein’s half-brother Barzan Al-Tikriti whose execution on Monday for crimes against humanity heightened sectarian tensions. Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki blamed Saddam loyalists and Muslim extremists for the brutal attack. “The horrendous crime was planned by a hopeless group of Saddamists and extremists,” he said in a statement. “They have committed an ugly crime against innocent students and we vow the perpetrators will not go free.”
Just minutes before the university bombing, a group of gunmen driving two motorcycles and a car fired on shoppers in Baghdad’s Al-Bounuk neighborhood, killing 10 people. The latest attacks came a few hours after the United Nations released a grim report on last year’s casualties across Iraq. Pointing to raging sectarian violence that has rocked Baghdad as the main cause of civilian deaths, the United Nations said that at least 34,452 Iraqis died around the country and another 36,685 were wounded in 2006.
The murders reached a peak in October, when 3,709 people were killed — the highest since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The Iraqi government has in the past disputed the UN’s figures, calling them “exaggerated.”
“The root causes of the sectarian violence lie in revenge killings and lack of accountability for past crimes as well as in the growing sense of impunity for ongoing human rights violations,” the UN said. Members of security forces, it said, remained prime targets along with women, children and teachers.
