Seven people were killed and 19 wounded when a car bomb exploded outside the Baghdad offices of an Arabic television station on Saturday, gouging a hole in the front of the building and sending thick plumes of black smoke into the air.
The Al-Arabiya satellite channel had received threats in recent weeks warning it of an attack, said Mohammed Abdelhamid (28), a correspondent for the Dubai-based station.
United States soldiers and Iraqi police on the scene, however, were unable to confirm what had been the target of the blast in the Mansour neighbourhood, which also houses several foreign embassies.
A huge crater was punched into the road by the force of the blast outside a car park and across the street from the television station, where firefighters were battling to put out a blaze.
The front of Al-Arabiya’s offices was destroyed, along with scores of cars that had been parked outside. The station said the dead include one of the building’s security guards and an administrative staffer.
”We have retrieved five corpses from the rubble,” said police Lieutenant Rauf Majdi. Al-Arabiya, in Dubai, put the death toll at seven, with several people wounded.
Police and national guards secured the area, as ambulances ferried the injured and the dead.
A doctor at the nearby Yarmuk hospital said 19 injured people had been admitted following the blast, while Abdelhamid from Al-Arabiya said three staff had been seriously hurt.
”It was a suicide car bomb targeting the Al-Arabiya building,” said Ahmed Abdulhamir, a driver for the television station.
An Interior Ministry spokesperson confirmed the attack but was unable to say whether it had been committed by a suicide bomber.
The Al-Arabiya correspondent said he thought it was a targeted attack.
”We have received threats recently in the form of letters from unknown groups,” said Abdelhamid, who has been on his way back to his office when the explosion occurred.
It was the first such strike suffered by Al-Arabiya in Baghdad, where it has between 40 and 50 staff, he added.
The building is also used by staffers of Al-Arabiya’s sister television station MBC, as well as staffers of the Saudi government’s news channel, Al-Ikhbariya.
Earlier in the week, a news anchor and her translator working for Iraq’s independent Al-Sharqiya television station were killed and two companions wounded in a drive-by shooting.
Liqa Abdul Razak, in her thirties, was travelling in a vehicle with three others in Baghdad’s southern Al-Saydiya neighbourhood when their car was ambushed by gunmen.
Abdul Razak’s death brought to 45 the number of journalists and other media workers killed in Iraq since the beginning of the US-led invasion in 2003, according to a tally by Paris-based media rights group Reporters sans Frontières.
In addition to the risk of kidnapping, journalists operating in Iraq have to contend with the daily violence and insecurity that plagues the country.
In early October, a photographer working for the European Press Agency was killed by masked gunmen in Mosul, while a female reporter working with Kurdish television company Al-Hurriya was gunned down outside her home in Baghdad. — Sapa-AFP