A suicide bomber who triggered an explosive device outside a Baghdad business school and slaughtered at least 40 people was a woman, a security official said Monday.
An attacker on Sunday detonated a bomb packed with ball bearings amid a crowd of mainly-Shi’ite students and guards in the entrance to Mustansiriyah University’s School of Economy and Administration in eastern Baghdad.
More than 40 people died and 55 were wounded, medics said.
”The person behind the al-Mustansiriyah bombing was a woman wearing a chador [an Islamic veil] and holding plastic sacks,” the Iraqi security official told Agence France-Presse on condition of anonymity.
Witnesses to the bombing told state television the same thing.
Suicide bombings are a daily occurence in Iraq, most of them blamed on Sunni insurgents opposed to the US-backed government or attempting to stir sectarian hate by slaughtering groups of Shi’ite civilians.
But so-called ”martyrdom operations” by women — as pioneered by Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger rebels and Palestinian militant groups — are still rare and shocking to Iraqis.
In September 2005, a woman was reported to have blown herself up in an attack in Tal Afar, in the north of the country. In November 2005, a Belgian convert to Islam died in an attack on a US convoy south of Baghdad.
In the same month, an Iraqi woman who was arrested after a suicide bomb attack on a wedding party in a Jordanian hotel admitted that she had tried to blow herself up but her bombs had failed to detonate. – Sapa-AFP