BAGHDAD, 2 August 2004 — At least nine people were killed and dozens injured in a series of coordinated attacks on churches across Iraq yesterday. The attacks came as talks for the release of seven hostages collapsed.
Police and government officials said at least three people were killed in Baghdad, two of whom perished when one of the bombs exploded inside a huge church and seminary compound in southern Baghdad, causing massive damage.
But a rescue worker at the Al-Dura compound said he pulled out six dead women and two dead children from the debris, though there was no immediate confirmation from medics.
Dozens of wounded were admitted into hospitals as the explosions unleashed chaos on the capital’s streets, officials said after the attacks, the first on Christian places of worship in post-Saddam Iraq.
The first car was detonated by a suicide bomber outside an Armenian church in Baghdad’s upmarket district of Karada, said policeman Haidar Abdul Hussein. Minutes later, a second car bomb exploded there. At about the same time, another bomb exploded near a Catholic Syriac church.
Police reported a fourth explosion in Baghdad, outside a Chaldean Catholic church in the east of the city.
Thick black smoke billowed in the sky above Karada, clearly visible for miles, as ambulances screamed through the streets and firemen battled to contain the blaze.
At Al-Dura, the ravaged compound resembled a war zone. The car exploded as worshippers were leaving the church after services.
“I went in right after the explosion to help with the dead and injured. I pulled out three women who were dead, before Iraqi police chased me away,” said Shaker Mahmud, 32.
“Six women and two children were killed,” said Alaa Andreas, a rescue volunteer. The glass windows of the church were shattered.
Nervous Iraqi police officers fired into the air around the sites of the explosions as US helicopters circled above and American soldiers deployed in force around the besieged churches.
“It’s a crime. It’s Sunday, we were at mass. There were a lot of women and children,” said Bishop Raphael Kutami at the Syriac church.
“There are so many injured and we don’t know how many. We were coming out of the church” when the bomb exploded, said another priest at the same church.
In Mosul, 370 km north of the capital, two car bombs exploded in the early evening outside the Mar Polis church in the central Mohandeseen neighborhood, said Maj. Mohammed Omar Taha. Medics there said one person was killed and 11 were wounded in the bombings.
In Kirkuk, a district police chief said an explosion went off at around 7.45 p.m. in a Christian residential neighborhood, but that there were no casualties because most people were at church.
As for hostages, Iraqi insurgents freed a Lebanese, but there was no word on another Lebanese seized in a growing wave of kidnappings of foreigners.
In a separate hostage standoff, a Kuwaiti company and a top Iraqi mediator dismissed reports that a group of seven foreign truck drivers — three Indians, three Kenyans and an Egyptian — had been freed.
“Iraqi commando forces carried out a military operation on the kidnappers of Vlad Damaa and released him half an hour ago,” a Lebanese source said in Beirut, declining to give any more details. Damaa was seized at gunpoint on Friday from a construction concern he runs with a brother that sells prefabricated buildings to US forces in Iraq, his family said. The second Lebanese hostage, Antoine Antoun, was kidnapped from his Baghdad dairy along with a Syrian trucker by gunmen, relatives said.
In the case of the seven truckers, the Iraqi tribal leader mediating with kidnappers for their release denied they had been freed as was claimed by the Kenyan government.
Sheikh Hisham Al-Dulaymi said negotiations to secure the hostages’ release had broken down and there was no longer contact with the hostage-takers.
Rana Abu-Zaineh, a spokeswoman for the Kuwaiti company the hostages work for, also said the report was false. She said negotiations to release the hostages failed after Dulaymi pulled out of the talks, and the company was working to persuade Dulaymi to continue pursuing their release.
In a letter to Dulaymi, the kidnappers said: “The Kuwaiti firm is stalling in responding to our demands, and the embassies and foreign governments do not care.
“We hope you announce your withdrawal from the negotiations... and we will do what is necessary concerning the hostages.”
— Additional input from agencies
