BAGHDAD, 6 September 2003 — Gunmen sprayed a mosque in Baghdad with bullets during Fajr prayers yesterday, wounding three worshipers before fleeing. Residents said the attack, in a mainly Shiite area of the capital, appeared intended to trigger conflict between Shiites and Sunnis.
“The attackers want civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. God will reveal who they are,” the Qibaa Mosque’s imam, Waleed Al-Azawi, said. “They want to break the unity of Muslims.”
About 40 worshippers were at the mosque when the attackers, thought to number three or four, pulled up in a vehicle, burst through the front gate and opened fire with assault rifles.
One of the three injured men was in critical condition.
At a plastics factory outside Baghdad a gas leak killed at least 14 Iraqis and left scores sick and choking. “We do not know if it was an accident or sabotage,” a police spokesman in the town of Bwab Al-Sham, just east of Baghdad, said.
Local residents said they detected a strong chemical smell from the plant late on Thursday night. When they went in, they found the contorted bodies of a family guarding the factory on the ground.
Some others living near the plant later died outside, bringing the toll to at least 14, witnesses and staff at a local hospital said.
Dozens more were being treated for sickness.
Meanwhile, a civilian British bomb disposal expert was killed in an ambush in northern Iraq. Ian Rimell, 53, was killed Thursday as he was traveling in a vehicle along a main road toward Mosul, the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) said in a statement.
An Iraqi colleague, Salem Ahmed Mohammed, was wounded in the late afternoon attack, it said, adding that he was in critical condition.
