BAGHDAD, 1 October 2004 — Insurgents stooped to a new low when they killed 34 children gathered to collect candies after the opening of a new sewage plant in the Iraqi capital.
At least 51 people were killed and 225 wounded in three separate attacks in the country, hospital and military officials said.
The attacks came as the Arab news network Al-Jazeera showed footage of 10 new hostages seized by militants. Al-Jazeera said the 10 — six Iraqis, two Lebanese and two Indonesian women — were taken by The Islamic Army in Iraq. The group has claimed responsibility for seizing two French journalists last month. Lebanon confirmed two of its citizens had been kidnapped.
“They work for the Jubail Company for Electrical Appliances and called for their company to stop dealing with what they called the occupation forces,” Al-Jazeera said.
In Jakarta, an Indonesian Foreign Ministry official said the ministry was not aware of any of its nationals being kidnapped in Iraq and declined to make further comment.
Multiple explosions rocked the western Baghdad neighborhood where the sewage plant was commissioned. Aside from the 34 children, eight adults died. One hundred and forty-one people, including 10 US soldiers, were wounded. Seventy-two of the injured were children under the age of 14, said Dr. Mohammed Salaheddin of Yarmouk Hospital.
Grief-stricken parents wailed over the bodies of their children at the hospital’s morgue. One women tore at her hair, before pulling back the sheet covering her dead brother and kissing his body.
Some of the children, who are near the end of a nationwide school vacation, said they were attracted to the blast scene by American soldiers handing out candy.
Interior Ministry spokesman Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman said two car bombs and a roadside bomb exploded in swift succession as a US convoy was passing through Baghdad’s Al-Amel neighborhood. But a military statement said all the blasts were caused by car bombs. Angry relatives screamed for attention for their wounded from the overwhelmed doctors, many of whose uniforms were covered in blood.
Hours earlier, a suicide bomber had killed two Iraqi policemen and a US soldier by blowing up his car near a US checkpoint at a crowded intersection in Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad. Around 60 people, including women and children, were wounded.
Another soldier was killed when a rocket hit a US logistics base near Baghdad. The confirmed deaths of the two soldiers raised to at least 802 the number of US troops killed in action since the start of the war.
The Baghdad attacks were claimed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi’s Tawhid wal Jihad group in a statement.
In northern Iraq, another car bomb blew up near an Iraqi police convoy in the center of Tall Afar, a rebellious town close to the Syrian border. Hospital officials said four civilians had been killed and 19 wounded. Five policemen were also hurt.
In rebel-held Fallujah, 50 km west of Baghdad, US forces destroyed a building they said was being used by fighters loyal to Zarqawi, whose group is threatening to behead a British hostage. Iraqi doctors said at least three people were killed and eight wounded in the attack.
Zarqawi’s group beheaded Americans Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley this month after US forces and the Iraqi government refused to release women prisoners.
The group says it will also kill the Briton Kenneth Bigley, 62, who was snatched along with the American pair.
On Wednesday, footage was released showing a haggard Bigley squatting chained in a cage, pleading for his life and seeking British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s intervention.
Blair ruled out negotiating with the kidnappers but said his government would do what it could to aid Bigley’s release. “I am not sitting here saying, ‘If they get in contact with us then we are just going to refuse to do anything,”’ Blair told the British Broadcasting Corp. yesterday. “We will do whatever we can. In fact, there is a lot that we are trying to do, which I won’t go into. But we are trying to do whatever we possibly can,” he said.
— Additional input from agencies
