BAGHDAD, 17 July 2005 — A suicide bomber in a fuel truck killed 58 people in a town south of Baghdad yesterday, the latest in a series of spectacular guerrilla attacks to rattle Iraq.
The bomb, which police said exploded near a Shiite mosque and market, also wounded 82 people in the town of Musayyib.
It followed several attacks which killed at least 16 people, including three British soldiers, yesterday.
The frenzy of suicide attacks suggests the government still has a long way to go before stamping out such attacks, which officials say is the biggest security threat to Iraq.
A suicide bomber in a car hit the Doura district in south Baghdad, killing three civilians and two policemen, a police source said.
Violence also erupted near the northern city of Mosul. A suicide bomber strapped with explosives attacked a police station, killing four policemen, police said.
Ten militants blew themselves up across Baghdad on Friday and another attacked Iskindiriya, south of the capital, killing at least 32 people, police said.
In Amara in southeast Iraq, three British soldiers died in what the Ministry of Defense in London said was a suspected roadside bomb. It said the deaths brought to 92 the number of British soldiers who have died in Iraq, including 53 killed in action.
A little-known Iraqi insurgent group said in a web statement that it was behind the killing of the British soldiers in southern Iraq yesterday.
“Thank God, this morning ... three British soldiers were killed and at least three others were injured by exploding a package by their patrol in the Maysan province,” the group, calling itself the Imam Hussein Brigades, said.
The statement was posted on a site used by the main Iraqi insurgent groups, including the Al-Qaeda group led by Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi. The name suggested it was a Shiite group. The group said it also killed an Iraqi judge in the town of Nassiriyah.
Sunni insurgents are leading a campaign of suicide bombings, assassinations and kidnappings in a bid to topple Iraq’s Shiite-led government backed by the United States.
In Baghdad, tense officers manned extra police checkpoints throughout the capital, journalists and drivers reported, after the series of blasts on Friday Al Qaeda described as an offensive to seize control of the city.
Suicide bombers have consistently undermined government promises that January elections would pacify the country, where violence has raised fears Iraq could slide toward civil war.
Militants, driving cars and blending in with the population, can strike without detection by security forces, who themselves have lost hundreds of comrades in the attacks.
Al-Qaeda’s Iraq wing, led by Jordanian Al-Zarqawi, boasted that the attacks had given it control of the capital, but there was no sign of militants in the streets.
“Through the day and the night, Baghdad rang with the music of the mujahedeen’s bullets and the prayers of the martyrs,” it said in an Internet statement.
“Our mujahedeen now control the streets,” it said. “Our sheikh Abu Mussab has urged us to intensify our attacks’”
