BAGHDAD, 17 February 2004 — Two US soldiers were killed in separate bomb attacks yesterday in central Iraq, and two children also died in what a senior US Army official said was a bomb attack in Baghdad.
A military policeman from the US Army’s 1st Armored Division died and another was wounded when a homemade bomb exploded as a three-vehicle convoy passed through the center of the Iraqi capital, the US-led coalition said.
Only 20 minutes later, another US soldier was killed and four others wounded in a bomb attack in Baqubah, 60 kilometers (35 miles) northeast of Baghdad, the military said.
Two individuals were detained by US troops immediately after the Baqubah blast, one of them carrying a mobile phone that may have been used to detonate the explosives, the military said.
Police said four Iraqis were wounded yesterday in a bombing targeting a US military convoy in Baqubah, but the US forces could not confirm if it was the same incident.
The US-led coalition’s deputy operations chief, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, later told reporters that a blast at a school in a northern Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad killed two children and wounded four others.
“An IED (improvised explosive device) exploded at a school in central Baghdad in the Kadhamiyah district today,” Kimmitt said, adding that a disposal team sent to the scene found a second bomb that was defused.
Initial Iraqi police reports indicated that the blast was caused by an old grenade accidentally detonated by schoolchildren.
A series of powerful blasts have targeted Iraq’s Shiite majority as well as the rival Sunni community, in what many US and Iraqi officials suspect is a plot by foreign fighters and old regime loyalists to provoke a civil war.
A rebel group claiming to represent militants in Fallujah denied any involvement in a raid that left 23 policemen dead Saturday and said it was suspending all attacks on Iraqi police.
The “Mujahedeen (holy warriors) of Fallujah” said it has decided “to stop all attacks against policemen and the (Iraqi) army until there is a new order,” in leaflets circulated in the town, 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Baghdad.
“We the fighters of Fallujah vow we do not have any ties to the operation carried out by the rabble without faith or honor that sullied our reputation,” the group said.
Following initial police reports on the presence of foreign fighters among Saturday’s attackers, Kimmitt said they were believed to be from Fallujah.
In other violence, a US civilian with a religious group was killed and three others were wounded Saturday when their taxi was ambushed by gunmen in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, as they were returning to the capital from the ancient city of Babylon, the US military said.
Elsewhere, Saddam Hussein’s Parliament speaker, Saadun Hammadi, was freed Saturday after nine months in prison around the country, his family and a bodyguard said, adding that he was in good health.
The 74-year-old Hammadi, a Shiite, shuttled between Abu Gharib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad and a US military detention center by the southern port of Umm Qasr before being jailed at Baghdad’s airport, a relative said. “He told us he had been well treated by the Iraqis and the American forces,” the relative said.
Hammadi, who was not on the US list of the 55 most wanted Iraqis, had been arrested by US troops on May 29.
Iraq’s 15-million Shiite majority, meanwhile, prepared for compromise with the US-led occupiers ahead of UN findings expected to judge their community’s demand for snap elections as unrealistic.
— Additional input from agencies
