Five Contractors Among 13 Dead in Baghdad Blast

Mon Jun 14, 2004 04:59 AM ET

By Lin Noueihed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide car bombing in the heart of Baghdad killed at least 13 people on Monday, including five foreign contractors working for Iraq 's U.S.-led authorities, whose convoy was the apparent target.

It was the second suicide bombing in the Iraqi capital in 24 hours and coincided with a wave of assassinations aimed at the new interim government appointed to take over from the U.S.-British occupation authorities on June 30.

Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said five foreign workers had been killed in the morning rush-hour attack, which devastated a busy street and ripped the front off one building.

"The terrorists are trying to prevent the transfer of power and sovereignty on June 30," Allawi told a news conference.

Hospital officials said at least eight other people had been killed and dozens wounded, many of them with severe burns or limbs torn off by the blast near Tahrir (Liberation) Square.

The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) employs thousands of contractors from many nations. Some are involved in reconstruction projects, others are private security guards.

Two Iraqi policemen at the scene said the blast had killed five people in one CPA vehicle which was reduced to a charred wreck. A police source said a bomber in a red four-wheel-drive vehicle had set off the explosion, which he said hit two other CPA vehicles and wounded five or six occupants.

Crowds of shocked and angry Iraqis swarmed over the area, some trying to pull survivors from the damaged building before police fired in the air to clear a path for emergency vehicles.

Dozens of people hammered on two of the CPA vehicles caught in the blast, chanting " America is the enemy of God," and later set fire to their fuel tanks.

U.S. tanks and other military vehicles escorted by soldiers on foot sealed off the area with razor wire. Truckloads of American troops in riot gear arrived to control the crowds.

On Sunday a suicide car bombing killed up to 12 Iraqis near a U.S.-Iraqi base in Baghdad and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil servant and a university professor. A top foreign ministry official was assassinated the previous day.

Senior U.S. officials warned that such attacks would continue and Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged to do "everything we can to defeat this insurgency."

Powell acknowledged the difficulty of providing security for Iraq 's new leaders. "It is going to be a dangerous period and these murderers have to be defeated," he said.

POLITICAL MOTIVE

Last month, a suicide bombing killed Izzedin Salim, the head of Iraq 's now-dissolved Governing Council, and another council member survived an ambush south of the capital.

U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the attacks were an attempt "to shake the will of the new interim government" in the run-up to the June 30 handover.

"We know that the period leading up to sovereignty and indeed the period immediately after sovereignty is likely to be one in which the terrorists and the Saddam loyalists enhance their efforts at violence," she said.

Interim President Ghazi Yawar described the assassinations as "random killings" and said violence would diminish once Iraq had rebuilt its own security forces.

Yawar said there were no plans to destroy Abu Ghraib prison despite an offer by President Bush to tear down the jail where some Americans abused Iraqi prisoners.

The U.S. military moved more prisoners from Abu Ghraib on Monday as part of a declared program to reduce numbers there to around 2,000 by the June 30 handover.

Witnesses said three buses left the jail on the outskirts of Baghdad . The military had said 585 prisoners would be freed on Monday.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which described abuses at Abu Ghraib in a report leaked in May, said last week the number of detainees there had fallen to 3,291 this month from 6,527 in March. The ICRC said it did not know how many had been freed and how many transferred elsewhere.

Yawar said the prison, already notorious as a place of torture and killing under Saddam Hussein, had cost more than $100 million and such money should not be wasted.

"We need every single dollar we have in order to rebuild our country instead of demolishing and rebuilding," he said.

Yawar said the new Iraqi government would take control of the Abu Ghraib prison after June 30.

Dozens hurt as blast rips up Baghdad street

Baghdad - A powerful car bomb killed at least 12 people, including five foreign contractors, and wounded more than 60 when it ripped through a busy Baghdad street in an attack on a vehicle convoy on Monday.

Adding to the carnage, the explosion brought down part of a building and destroyed a row of shops, including a liquor store, in crowded Sadoun Street on the east bank of the Tigris river.

It was the second major blast in 24-hours. At least seven Iraqis died in a suicide car bomb near a United States-led occupation base in the capital on Sunday.

US and Iraqi officials have warned of an upsurge in violence ahead of the June 30 handover of sovereignty in Iraq , now barely two weeks away.

'Their bodies have been taken to a morgue at Baghdad airport'

About 30 minutes after the Monday morning attack, a civilian contractor was killed when a roadside bomb exploded and gunfire hit an occupation convoy in eastern Baghdad .

The huge blast in Sadoun Street targeted passing four-wheel-drive vehicles of the type favoured by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

"The occupation told us that two British, one American, one French and one Filipino national were among the dead," a diplomatic source said.

"Their bodies have been taken to a morgue at Baghdad airport," the diplomat said on condition of anonymity, adding that the five contractors had been working for the US power company General Electric.

Three foreigners were also wounded, said Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, adding that the foreigners had been helping to rebuild Iraq 's battered electricity sector.

'No, no, America ! No, no, Governing Council'

In addition, at least seven Iraqis were killed and about 60 wounded in the bombing, according to a tally by three local hospitals and the US military.

An AFP photographer saw a charred corpse in a burnt vehicle and four bodies covered in sheets at the site of the blast in the street lined with restaurants, shops and houses.

The vehicle convoy, two tan Mitsubishis and a GMC, was heading down the street, not far from the main headquarters of the US-led occupation across the river, when the explosion struck at 8.15am (04h15 GMT).

Major Mohammed Saleh, the senior police officer at the scene, said: "It was a three-car American convoy. A suicide car bomber in a small Volkswagen Brasilia drove between the cars and blew himself up," Saleh said.

Other witnesses said they thought a parked car was detonated by remote control as the convoy sped by, but there was no independent confirmation.

The blast blew one vehicle off the road and onto a central grass square.

An angry mob quickly crowded around the two other vehicles that stood charred but intact on the road. Chanting "No, no, America ! No, no, Governing Council," the Iraqis hit the vehicles with sticks and threw stones.

Police fired shots into the air but were unable to disperse the crowd who jumped onto the vehicles and then set fire to them. They threw alcohol from one of the wrecked shops into the flames.

"The Americans are in charge of the disasters that happen in Iraq like this explosion," shouted Tahseen Karman, 25, a worker at a nearby building site, brandishing a large stick which he had used to smash the vehicles.

"They are responsible for this explosion," he said.

People piled wounded on to the back of trucks and inside cars and rushed them to the hospital. Some medics bandaged wounded and bloodied Iraqis on the pavement. Wounded Iraqis leaned on rescuers as they left the damaged building.

Saad Jassim Mohammed, 24, who was eating in a restaurant when the attack struck, said: "I rushed up to the building and I took out six dead bodies and I took out two people who were alive."

Army helicopters buzzed overhead as ambulance sirens wailed. Later in the morning four tanks and at least 20 military Humvees rumbled up to the site and soldiers equipped with riot shields sealed off the area.

Since the new Iraqi caretaker government was unveiled on June 1, there has been a wave of car bombings and assassinations of government officials.

"This is another despicable example of a targeted attack on those who are assisting the rebuilding of Iraq 's infrastructure," US military spokesperson, Brigadier General Mark Kimmit, said.

At a news conference, Iraq 's new prime minister Iyad Allawi pledged a united front to defeat the insurgents.

"We will take decisive and strong positions to protect the honour, money and lives of Iraqis," he said.

Earlier in the morning five bus loads of prisoners left the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside the capital, while in the south of Iraq, British Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon began a surprise 24-hour trip to the city of Basra, where most of Britain's 8 000 troops in Iraq are deployed. - Sapa-AFP

Published on the Web by IOL on 2004-06-14 14:24:02

© Independent Online 2004. All rights reserved. IOL publishes this article in good faith but is not liable for any loss or damage caused by reliance on the information it contains.

Car bombing kills 10, starts riot in Baghdad

By TOM LASSETER
Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD , Iraq - In some of the worst rioting since Baghdad fell last year, hundreds of Iraqis threw stones at U.S. soldiers, burned an American flag, danced around the charred body of a foreign contractor and looted a handful of stores Monday in downtown Baghdad .

The outburst of rage came after a suicide car bomber crashed into a convoy of three sport utility vehicles carrying Westerners just after 8 a .m., killing at least 10 Iraqis and wounding more than 50, according to doctors at three hospitals. There were five foreigners killed and three wounded in the blasts.

A General Electric spokeswoman confirmed that the five dead comprised three employees of Granite Services - a GE company - and two security workers. Officials in Baghdad said that among the five were two Britons, two Americans and a Frenchman.

The front side of a two-story building that contained shops and apartments was left in rubble, and at least seven cars were charred and blasted by shrapnel.

There have been at least 15 car bombings in Iraq so far this month. And while such bombings once commonly targeted buildings such as U.S. military bases and Iraqi police stations, recently there have been several kamikaze-like strikes at convoys of Iraqi police, Western contractors and coalition soldiers.

The violence comes as the country is counting down the days to June 30, when U.S. officials will hand over sovereignty to a recently formed Iraqi government.

"It is an unfortunate and cowardly incident that happened today," Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said. "Five civilians have been killed and another three civilians severely injured. These people have been helping Iraq to rebuild its power stations and reconstruct its electricity and power generation. Additionally, a number of Iraqis have been also killed and injured. We deplore this terrorist act and vow to get the criminals to justice as soon as possible."

Despite Allawi's words of assurance, the scene on the street suggested that popular revulsion against the U.S. occupation and the government is growing. The rioting in Baghdad 's Tahrir Square lasted for hours.

When American soldiers from the 1st Calvary Division arrived in a handful of Humvees, they were quickly surrounded by Iraqis chanting, "Down! Down! USA " and "Down! Down! With the new government!" A crowd on one flank threw rock after rock, surging forward until the soldiers advanced, M-16 rifles raised.

A group of soldiers tackled one man, dragging him away from the crowd. Two other soldiers made obscene gestures involving their middle fingers.

After about two hours, the soldiers drove off, leaving behind a group of Iraqi policemen, who soon evacuated the area.

For a few minutes, a lone Iraqi police pickup was stuck in the middle of the crowd. An officer stepped out of the vehicle and shot his 9 mm pistol into the sky. No one paid any attention, and he quickly got back in and drove away.

The screams of "Yes! Yes! Muqtada Sadr" seemed to last forever. Al-Sadr is a firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric whose militia has fought with U.S. soldiers in Najaf and the Baghdad slum of Sadr City . It seemed clear, though, that his name was being used as an anti-America rallying cry as much as anything else.

By noon, the area had been secured by swarms of Humvees, tanks and a long row of American soldiers wearing riot gear and carrying shields.

One of the looted stores carried a brand of Jordanian beer, and much of the crowd grabbed cans of "Philadelphia Beer" and hurled them into the fires leaping from the SUVs, cheering when the cans popped like gunfire. Two men outside the shop fought each other, one with a knife and the other a screwdriver, over a case of the brew.

A group of men danced around a dead man pulled from one of the vehicles. People grabbed some of the beer and poured it over the body. A man waved what looked like a British passport in the air, laughing and pumping his fist.

Hospitals were crammed with the wounded and dying.

"It is not acceptable to Allah. I don't think any human being with a conscience would accept this," said Mohammed Abdul Kadir, 71, who was angry over the attack on the convoy. He was knocked to the ground by the blast and half-buried by bricks from a falling building.

"Look around me. Look at these people," Kadir said, pointing to men whose clothes, like his, were splattered with blood.

Across town, in another hospital, Bassim Mutashir, 20, sat on a bed next to his cousin. The two men, construction workers from Hilla, had come to Baghdad five days earlier to look for work.

Mutashir's head was bandaged and he was in pain.

"With the new Iraqi government, the situation will stay the same and the people will never feel safe," he said.

His cousin lay next to him, unconscious, with several serious shrapnel wounds. A doctor walked up and looked at the two for a long moment before speaking.

"Our surgery room is full," he said. "You'll have to go to another hospital."

Mutashir said he was afraid his cousin would be dead by day's end.