A suicide bomber detonated a car loaded with up to 225kg of explosives outside an army centre in Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 36 people, mainly recruits queuing to sign up.
The attack came less than 24 hours after a almost identical attack on a police station south of the Iraqi capital that left 55 dead, mostly unemployed Iraqis who had been applying for police jobs.
”Thirty six Iraqi men were killed,” Major John Frisbie of the US 1st Armoured Division said at the scene of the blast in the southeast of the capital, adding the toll included the bomber. Another 25 people were wounded, he said.
Three of the dead were security officers who had been guarding the facility, Frisbie said.
The force of the blast punched a hole in the tarmac and scattered charred pieces of the exploded car across the road in front of the recruiting station. Bloodstains streaked the sidewalk.
US Colonel Ralph Baker also said from the scene that a white Oldsmobile, loaded with between 135 and 225 kilograms of explosives, had been driven up to the recruiting centre by a single male at about 7.25am [0425 GMT].
”It was a suicide attack,” he said.
Colonel Jassem Saher, chief of traffic police for Baghdad, said the car was travelling very slowly in front of the recruiting centre when it exploded.
Witnesses said up to 300 recruits had been standing in line in front of the building when the bomb detonated, blowing out nearby windows.
One of the recruits, Haytham Imad, a former army officer under Saddam Hussein, described his lucky escape.
”They had called 60 of us forward to enter the building, I was one of them.
”We had passed behind the protection wall when the explosion happened. There was shattered glass everywhere, we ran inside the building to take all the blankets to cover the dead.”
Colonel Baker described the blast as ”devastating” and said it bore hallmarks of earlier attacks blamed on al-Qaeda.
”It was devastating for the young men who were waiting in front of the facility,” he said.
”Unfortunately, this is not the first bomb attack of this nature we have seen in this city,” he said, adding that it resembled ”techniques of Al-Qaeda or Al-Ansar”, a local offshoot of Osama bin Laden’s terror network.
On Tuesday, US officials said the attack on the police station at Iskandariya, 45km from Baghdad, bore the ”fingerprints” of al-Qaeda, although it was too early to speculate on who was directly responsible.
A January 18 suicide attack on the coalition headquarters in Baghdad left at least 24 dead, while twin suicide bombings in the northern Kurdish town of Arbil killed 105.
US officials said the latest strikes fit strategies outlined in an extremist memo recovered in a raid in Iraq, which calls for al-Qaeda help in fomenting a civil war to combat strengthening Iraqi security forces and disrupt a June 30 transfer of power. – AFP
