A suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives detonated himself outside an Iraqi army recruitment centre in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing at least 21 people.
It was the latest in a string of recent attacks on an Iraqi national guard base at Muthana airfield in western Baghdad. Another 27 people were injured in the blast, the United States military said.
Elsewhere in Iraq, at least five people, including three policemen, were killed. The attacks bring to more than 60 the number of Iraqis killed in the past two days.
At first Iraqi officials said the explosion at the recruitment centre was a mortar attack but the US military later said a suicide bomber on foot was responsible. The bomber detonated himself close to a truck carrying recruits into the base. Most of the dead appeared to be young men.
Iraqi officials claimed another arrest yesterday of a militant from the network led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose group is blamed for most of the suicide bombings in Iraq. They said the network’s ”military adviser”, named as Anad Muhamad Hamad al-Qaysi, was arrested in southern Baghdad in a raid on January 24. He was described as an Iraqi man, aged 41, who had helped finance attacks.
In Tikrit, Iraqi police said they had arrested another suspect, named as Khalid Zakiyah, who is thought to be responsible for several beheadings of Iraqis in the northern city of Mosul.
Despite a series of announcements hailing similar arrests recently, there appears to be little halt to the bomb attacks that have ravaged Iraq. Three in the past two days have shattered the brief calm that descended around election day at the end of last month.
In other violence on Tuesday, three policemen were killed in the violent western Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliyah. Gunmen fired on the car of a politician, Mithal al-Alusi, killing his two sons but leaving him untouched. It was the latest of several attempts on his life. Last year, Alusi headed the De-Ba’athification Commission. He was sacked from the job after protests following a trip he made to Israel.
There was conflicting information about the fate of an Italian journalist who was kidnapped in Baghdad last Friday. One group which claimed to have taken Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter on the Communist daily Il Manifesto, said she would be released shortly because it had determined she was not a spy. Another group claimed it had killed her.
Four Egyptian telecoms engineers have been freed after they were kidnapped in Baghdad on Sunday. – Guardian Unlimited