An Iraqi suspected of involvement in Wednesday’s devastating bomb attacks in Basra came from the Sunni city of Falluja, Iraqi officials said on Thursday, suggesting that the blasts may not have been the work of al-Qaeda but an act of revenge for the United States’s brutal offensive in the city.
According to British officials, Basra’s governor, Wael Abdullatif, told colleagues on Wednesday night that an Iraqi caught running away from the scene of one of the explosions had travelled to southern Iraq from Falluja.
He was detained outside the police academy in Zubayr, 24km south of Basra, which was the scene of two of Wednesday’s car bomb attacks.
As the death toll from the explosions rose to 74 yesterday, with 160 injured, Abdullatif said the Iraqi authorities were pursuing several leads and expected to make more arrests shortly.
He gave no further details of the man in custody, but Iraqi officials said ”seven or eight” Iraqis from the mainly Sunni town of Zubayr had been killed in the US military’s offensive against Falluja.
Wednesday’s blasts — all directed at police stations — now look unlikely to have been carried out by al-Qaeda or foreign Islamists. The most likely theory is that they were the work of local Iraqis incensed by the deaths of hundreds of fellow Sunnis killed in Falluja by US troops.
”Violence creates violence,” said Shaker Muhawesh, the managing editor of the Sunni Alsaah newspaper, on Thursday.
”The Americans are over-using violence against Iraqi civilians. This is a mistake. The gap between the Americans and the Iraqis is growing. Since Falluja, even people who were neutral are turning against them.”
The mood across Basra was subdued on Thursday, with streets quiet and roads closed, as the first funerals of the victims took place. They included eight nursery school children and nine teenage girls. Their school minibuses were incinerated in the blast outside the al-Saudia police station. The explosions outside a total of three police stations were the most deadly attack in British-occupied southern Iraq since last year’s invasion.
On Thursday hundreds of supporters of the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr took to the streets to denounce the failure of British troops in the city to ensure security.
Chanting ”No to America” and holding mock coffins and banners that read ”We condemn Blair the criminal”, the protesters demanded that British forces hand over control of Basra to Iraqis.
On Thursday Dominic D’Angelo, the British spokesperson for Iraq’s coalition provisional authority in Basra, said Sadr’s supporters were trying to sow ”discord and doubt”.
”The attacks were designed not only to injure the police, but were always destined to kill civilians as well,” he said. ”The coalition in the south is being effective and for quite some time has kept Basra in a pretty good state.”
The governor, Abdullatif, had announced that the suspect in custody was from Falluja after a meeting of Basra’s provisional government, he said.
Speaking at his monthly news conference in London, Tony Blair said on Thursday that ”evil, barbaric people” should not be allowed to stop the reconstruction of Iraq. The UN would play an important role in rebuilding the country, he said, being the only body with ”the international credibility to be able to certify and help guide the process of political transition.”
George Bush has said that al-Qaeda was behind the Basra bombings. On Thursday Major General Mark Kimmitt, the US military’s spokesperson in Baghdad, said the ”nature of the attacks” suggested the involvement of Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant linked both to al-Qaeda and to previous suicide bomb attacks in Kerbala and Irbil. He admitted that the US had no further evidence for the claim.
Across the rest of Iraq there was more violence on Thursday. In Baghdad a gunman wearing traditional Arab dress confronted South African security guard who worked for the coalition provisional authority as he shopped in a supermarket, declared that he was Jewish, and shot him dead. The guard’s Iraqi translator was wounded.
After a gun battle on Wednesday that left 36 Iraqis dead, Falluja was calm on Thursday, although clashes erupted in the nearby town of Karma.
US troops encircling the city stopped locals who had fled earlier battles from returning home.
A US commander, Lieutenant General James Conway, told the Associated Press that insurgents in the city had ”days not weeks” to hand over their weapons before another US attack. The weapons turned in so far were ”junk” and amounted to a ”pickup truck-full”, he said.
Two Swiss hostages abducted in southern Iraq on Tuesday were freed on Thursday, together with an Arab Israeli working for a private company who was kidnapped two weeks ago.
But there was no word last night on the fate of three Italian contractors, after reports that the Italian government had paid a ransom. – Guardian Unlimited Â