Twenty-four Iraqi children were killed on Wednesday morning by a suicide car bomber in Baghdad, as sectarian tensions were stoked when 11 Sunni Arabs were found shot dead after allegedly being arrested by police commandos.
Another 18 children were wounded in the blast, which targeted a United States military convoy in the south-east of the capital and left one US soldier dead and two injured, hospital and US sources said.
”A driver approached one of the US Humvees and then detonated his car,” said Sergeant David Abrams.
Witness Mohammed Ali Hamza said US forces turned up in the Al-Jedidah district to warn residents to stay indoors because of reports of a car bomb in the area.
”Children gathered round the Americans, who were handing out sweets. Suddenly, a suicide car bomber drove round from a side street and blew himself up,” he added.
”We have received the bodies of 24 children aged between 10 and 13,” said the official in charge of the morgue at Kindi hospital, who asked not to be named.
Tortured bodies found
Elsewhere in Baghdad, a Sunni Muslim religious official said the tortured bodies of 11 Sunni Arabs, who had been killed execution-style with a bullet to the head, were found on Tuesday after having been arrested by police commandos two days earlier.
The latest twist in growing tensions between Sunnis and the majority Shi’ite community comes as the top US general announced that a key aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leading al-Qaeda operative in Iraq and a fanatic anti-Shi’ite, has been captured by US forces.
The Sunnis, including an imam prayer leader, were arrested in a police commando raid at their homes in northern Baghdad early on Sunday, said the official of the Waqf religious organisation who did not want to be identified.
Their bodies were found dumped in the north of the city on Tuesday, he added, and ”all bore torture marks and bullet wounds to the back of the head”.
Hussein Ali Kamal, deputy minister for intelligence at the interior ministry, said it is not known who was responsible for the killings.
”The minister has issued orders that nobody be arrested without a warrant,” he said.
”Every day we find innocent people killed and their bodies dumped in the streets. We don’t know who’s responsible. The minister has ordered that a special committee be set up to look into this very explosive issue.
”There are people who dress up in police or commandos uniforms to carry out, even at night, horrible attacks, which are then blamed on police,” he said.
The head of the Waqf, Adnan al-Dulaimi, called on Wednesday for an official investigation into the case and asked that its results be made public.
”This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened,” Dulaimi said in a statement. ”We want to know who is responsible for such horrible crimes.”
There have been numerous allegations of mistreatment and killings of Sunnis by special police forces over the past few months.
The Sunni Arab minority, which was dominant under the regime of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, is believed to provide the backbone to the current insurgency.
On Sunday, nine Sunni bricklayers died while in police custody in Baghdad, after being beaten up and left to suffocate in a police van, several witnesses said, including one who survived the ordeal.
Zarqawi aide captured
In Washington, meanwhile, the chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said a key aide to Zarqawi had been captured in what he described late on Tuesday as a ”pretty good success”.
But General Richard Myers acknowledged that coalition troops in Iraq face ”a very dangerous insurgency” that is far from being on its death bed.
”Just yesterday on the battlefield, we picked up Zarqawi’s main leader in Baghdad; they call him the Emir of Baghdad, Abu Abd al-Aziz, and that’s going to hurt that operation of Zarqawi’s pretty significantly,” Myers said.
He did not offer any details.
In other incidents on Wednesday, police Colonel Shaalan Abdul Jelil was shot dead north-east of Baghdad and another police officer was killed by gunmen outside in home in southern Baghdad, an interior ministry official said.
Three more police officers and three civilians were wounded on Wednesday in two more incidents in the capital.
Meanwhile, the Australian government announced that it will deploy about 150 elite troops to Afghanistan to fight a resurgence in rebel attacks but has no plans to send more soldiers to Iraq.
And in Washington, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday he has not seen a British ministry of defence report on a major US-British troop reduction in Iraq in 2006, but the projected figures seem ”plausible”.
Meanwhile, Turkish newspapers said two Turks suspected of involvement in the 2003 bomb attacks in Istanbul, which killed 63 people, have been arrested in Iraq and that Ankara is seeking their extradition. — AFP
