At least 10 people were killed, many burnt to death in their cars, when a car bomb exploded in the middle of a traffic jam at the crossroads of a shopping street in Baghdad on Thursday, police and medics said.
Flames raged around one car with four children trapped inside after the blast ripped through a line of vehicles at the peak of the morning rush hour.
”It is a car bomb in Saadun Street,” said Major Mohammed Fuad, from the Saadun police station.
”It happened on the crossroads of Nassar Square where there was a major traffic jam. More than 10 cars are burning and many of them have people still inside,” he said.
Shop fronts were totally destroyed and one car dangled perilously from the roof of a five-storey building nearby where it was thrown by the force of the blast that sent a thick column of black smoke skyward.
Injured civilians, many with their arms or legs broken, lay in the street awaiting ambulances, which had to battle through the heavy queues of cars that typically clog the roads of central Baghdad, an AFP reporter on the scene said.
”We were driving very slowly because of the traffic jam and a car in front suddenly blew up,” recalled Hussein Ali, with a stuttering voice due to shock, his face badly cut.
A toll by AFP from three nearby hospitals put the number of dead at 10 and the number of wounded at 25.
The blast came just days after Prime Minister Iyad Allawi declared a state of emergency across most of the country and slapped a night-time curfew on Baghdad in a frantic effort to stem the escalating chaos as the country prepares for national elections promised by January. — Sapa-AFP