A suicide truck bomber struck on Sunday outside a police station in Baghdad, killing at least 40 people, the United States military said.
Television pictures showed a deep crater in the road outside the Rashad police station in the New Baghdad neighbourhood in the east of the capital, as ambulances and fire fighters attended the scene. Iraqi police sources had earlier put the death toll at 22.
In a statement, the US military said a flat-bed truck loaded with 220kg of explosives blew up at the front gate of the police station. It said 25 people were wounded in the explosion, which destroyed a dozen vehicles.
More than 200 people have died in the past 10 days in an series of suicide car bomb attacks in and near the capital.
A week ago, about 100 people were killed and at least 130 were injured in the town of Musayyib, south of Baghdad capital, after a suicide bomber blew up a fuel tanker in front of a Shia mosque near a crowded marketplace.
In today’s attack, a car was driven into concrete barriers surrounding the police station.
Insurgents have regularly targeted Iraq’s police and security forces in attempts to destabilise the country, while Iraqi political parties struggle to put together a new Constitution.
Members of former prime minister Ayad Allawi’s bloc threatened to walk out of the constitutional drafting committee in support of a Sunni group that has boycotted the process.
A committee member, Adnan al-Janabi, who is also part of Allawi’s eight-member group, criticised the way the commission had dealt with the Sunni members’ decision to suspend their participation in drafting the new charter.
”Their demands and suspension of membership should have been studied and taken in a way that reassures them and brings them to participate in the draft constitution that we want to be agreed upon by all Iraqis,” he said.
Last week, the 12 remaining Sunni members of the commission suspended their participation the drafting of the Constitution in protest at the assassination of a Sunni member, Mijbil Issa, and an adviser, Dhamim Hussein al-Obeidi, by unknown gunmen.
Two of the original 15 Sunni members had already resigned earlier over insurgent threats against them. They had demanded an international investigation into the killings, better security and a greater Sunni role in deliberations.
The minority Sunnis dominated the political system under Saddam Hussein, but now fear being sidelined by the majority Shias, who make up some 60% of the population.
The threatened walkout by Allawi’s group is the latest hurdle in the commission’s goal of getting a Constitution drafted and approved by August 15. The charter would then be scheduled for a public referendum two months later.
The US sees a new Constitution as a vital building block in restoring stability to Iraq and as a prelude to any military withdrawal.
According to a survey from Iraq Body Count and the Oxford Research Group, nearly 25 000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the two years since the invasion, and four times as many died at the hands of US-led forces as from suicide bombers and other insurgents.
The survey, which calculates the toll of dead and injured since March 2003, also shows that the rate of criminal violence has risen dramatically. – Guardian Unlimited Â