BAGHDAD: A fuel tanker exploded Sunday near a checkpoint outside of Baghdad International Airport, Iraqi officials said, along a route once known as the world’s deadliest road because of frequent attacks there during the height of the insurgency.
There were conflicting reports about the cause of the explosion with Iraqi police saying it was a bomb attached to the truck while an airport official maintained it was an accident. At least five guards at the checkpoint were wounded, the two officials said. There were no fatalities reported.
The police official said a bomb attached to the tanker detonated at the checkpoint on the four-lane road leading to the airport.
But airport spokesman Kareem Al-Timini said the explosion was an accident that was caused when the driver started a fire on the side of the road. “It was a fire the driver set to cook his breakfast,” he said.
The explosion caused four other tankers to catch fire, Al-Timini and the police official said. The tanker caught fire at a checkpoint that also leads to Camp Victory, the US military headquarters next to the airport.
Al-Timini said the tanker was part of a fuel convoy on its way to the American base.
But Sgt. 1st Class Raymond Piper, a military spokesman, denied the tanker was part of an American convoy, though he did not immediately say whether the truck was headed to the base.
The cause of the fire was under investigation.
Meanwhile, Iraqi police said one Al-Qaeda-linked fugitive was killed and another was arrested in a raid just west of Samarra, about 50 km south from where they made a stunning jailbreak late last month.
The two were among five Al-Qaeda prisoners who had been sentenced to death to break out of a makeshift jail in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit. The arrest brings to at least nine the number of prisoners recaptured.
A police official says the one fugitive killed Sunday was resisting arrest.
The escape was an embarrassment for Iraqi authorities as they struggle to upgrade detention facilities before absorbing thousands more inmates from US forces by next year.
