BAQUBA, 29 July 2004 — More than 120 people were killed in a suicide bombing and clashes yesterday in two main cities as Iraq’s interim government marked its first month in office embroiled in deadly violence and a hostage crisis.
The hostage took a new twist with extremists in Iraq killing two Pakistani hostages and releasing an Iraqi, Al Jazeera television said late yesterday. Al Jazeera said it had received a video tape showing the killings but it would not air it as it was too gruesome. The kidnappers said they freed the Iraqi after he “recanted”.
A minibus packed with explosives blew up near a police station. The powerful suicide bomb left a sea of destruction, obliterating market stalls and destroying several buildings.
Up to 68 people were killed and dozens wounded in the morning blast in the town of Baquba, north of Baghdad, that struck as dozens of police recruits queued outside a police post seeking work and a bus passed by laden with passengers.
Twenty-one people traveling in a minibus alongside the one that detonated were killed, an Interior Ministry source said.
“The hospital officials have told me that 68 were dead and 56 injured in the Baquba blast,” Health Minister Alaadin Alwan said.
A doctor at Baquba hospital put the number of injured as high as 70. As emergency workers continued to collect bodies from the scene, the provincial police chief blamed the attack on Al-Qaeda-linked militants.
It was the worst death toll from a single bomb attack in Iraq since a blast outside a mosque in the holy city of Najaf last August killed more than 80 people.
Foreign troops and Iraqi security forces also clashed with guerrillas in several areas of western and southern Iraq, but the military said it was not known whether the attacks were coordinated to mark the one-month anniversary of the handover.
The US military said seven members of Iraq’s security forces and 35 guerrillas were killed in fighting south of Baghdad. It said the Iraqi forces, backed by US and Ukrainian troops, also captured 40 insurgents in the battle.
In western Iraq two foreign soldiers were killed and two aircraft were forced to make emergency landings after coming under fire in a series of clashes, a US spokesman said. He did not give the nationality of the dead. Most troops in the area are US Marines.
Confirming that a suicide bomber triggered the massive Baquba explosion, Gen. Walid Khaled Abdel Salam accused a group loyal to Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda’s suspected chief in Iraq, of masterminding the attack.
An AFP correspondent saw at least a dozen bodies lined up outside the hospital’s morgue, already crammed to capacity with the dead. Maimed bodies were strewn outside the police station amid pools of muddied blood. Police officer Mohammed Jassim said the area had been jammed with people. “Young men were queuing outside to join the police and a bus passed by,” he said.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell, on a Middle East tour, said the latest bombing was yet another “attempt by murderers to deny the Iraqi people the dream of a peaceful sovereign country”.
Meanwhile, three sons of the governor of Al-Anbar province, where many foreign hostages are thought to be hidden, were kidnapped by gunmen who barged into the official’s private home in the flash point city of Ramadi, police said.
The sons, one of them a teenager, were snatched before gunmen torched the building while Governor Abdul Karim Burghis Al-Rawi was at work, police said. Separately, one insurgent was killed and 11 US troops wounded when their military camp outside the city was attacked, the US military said.
Minutes later, two US aircraft were forced to land after coming under small arms fire, in an incident which left one pilot wounded. The military later said two US service members died of their wounds in Anbar province yesterday without saying if it was linked to the attack on the camp or related to the aircraft incident.
West of Fallujah, four Iraqi policemen were killed and one was wounded when a homemade bomb targeted a joint US and Iraqi convoy, a security officer said. Two people were killed, including a 13-year-old child, in a Baghdad mortar attack, while two Iraqis suspected of trying to bomb a northern oil pipeline were shot dead as a policeman was killed making his way home, police said.
