BAGHDAD, 26 June 2007 — Suicide bombers struck a Baghdad hotel and police targets yesterday in a wave of insurgent bombings in Iraq that killed at least 35 people, including a lawmaker, policemen and tribal leaders.
The three attacks came a day after an Iraqi court sentenced to death Ali Hassan Al-Majid, widely known as “Chemical Ali,” for the slaughter of 182,000 Kurds in 1988.
A suicide bomber blew himself up in the crowded lobby of Baghdad’s Al-Mansour Hotel, killing at least 12 people, including a Shiite lawmaker and some Sunni tribal sheikhs, staff and security officials said. They said the explosion, which also wounded 21 people, occurred during an informal gathering of local tribal sheikhs at the hotel located on the west bank of the Tigris River.
Security officials confirmed that the meeting was the target of the attack in the hotel, which houses diplomats and some foreign media organizations.
An AFP correspondent said charred bodies of the victims and many of the wounded were lying near the reception desk in the rubble-strewn lobby, and that the ceiling had collapsed on the bodies.
A hotel employee said a group of five or six tribal sheikhs had come into the lobby and ordered tea. As the employee headed back to the kitchen the explosion went off behind him.
One of those killed was Fassal Al-Gawud, an ex-governor of the western Sunni province of Anbar, where several tribal sheikhs have recently allied with US and Iraqi forces against Al-Qaeda, according to security officials.
Hussein Shaalan, a Shiite MP from the liberal Iraqi National List of former pro-Western Premier Iyad Allawi’s political bloc and a tribal chief from the central city of Diwaniyah, was also killed along with his son and a bodyguard.
Other victims included Rahim Al-Maliki, a poet employed by Iraq’s state-run Iraqiyah television, and two Sunni tribal sheikhs. Five more unidentified people were also killed.
Sheikh Mahmud Daham from Anbar, who was in the hotel, said the attack “targeted the tribes that are fighting terrorism.” “Iraq will stay standing, no matter what you do. We are not afraid of you and we are going to continue fighting you,” he said amid the wreckage with corpses around him.
The attack came shortly after two other suicide bombings killed another 23 people, mostly policemen, in the north and central regions of the country.
The deadliest strike was in the northern oil refining town of Baiji in which 15 people were killed when a bomber plowed an explosives-laden oil tanker into the police headquarters of the town, a local police officer said.
