An explosion rocked a restaurant inside the Iraqi parliament in Baghdad while lawmakers were having lunch on Thursday and local media said two were killed.
If confirmed as a bomb, the blast would represent one of the worst security breaches of the heavily fortified Green Zone that houses Parliament and other government buildings since the United States-led invasion in 2003.
Iraqiya state television said two lawmakers had been killed. Another television station said one was Mohammed Awadh, a Sunni. Police said two people were killed but did not give details.
”We heard a huge explosion inside the restaurant. We went to see what was going on. We saw lots of smoke coming from the hall, with people lying on the ground and pools of blood,” a parliamentary official told Reuters by telephone from the scene.
Earlier, a truck bomb killed at least seven people on a key bridge in northern Baghdad, destroying most of the steel structure and sending several cars plunging into the River Tigris below, police said.
The blasts come amid a US-backed security crackdown in Baghdad that is regarded as a last-ditch attempt to halt Iraq’s plunge into all-out sectarian civil war.
Militants have rarely managed to penetrate the various checkpoints and carry out attacks inside the Green Zone, although they frequently fire mortars and rockets into the area.
A Reuters witness said the blast took place at the cashier’s register in the café, which is near Parliament’s main assembly hall. Parliament was in session on Thursday.
”There was a big blast, I saw the fire. There were many, many wounded. Windows were shattered,” said the witness who was lightly wounded in the arm.
A leading Shi’ite lawmaker, Hadi al-Amiri, blamed poor security for the explosion. Police have yet to say if it was caused by a bomb.
Recently, the US military said two suicide vests had been found inside the zone, a sprawling area that also houses the US embassy.
One of Iraq’s vice-presidents survived a bomb attack at a government ministry outside the Green Zone in February. A deputy prime minister was wounded last month in a suicide bomb attack at a prayer hall in his compound in the capital.
Bridge collapse
Two main sections of the Sarafiya bridge, a main artery linking east and west Baghdad, collapsed into the river after the truck bomb exploded just before the morning rush hour.
One army officer on the scene said explosive charges might have also been used to bring down a bridge that local residents said was built by the British in the early 1900s.
Among the dead were four policemen who drowned after their car toppled into the river’s muddy waters, police said.
US and Iraqi forces launched a security crackdown in the capital two months ago that has reduced death squad killings, but car and truck bombs still kill and wound scores.
The destruction of the bridge will cause major disruption in northern Baghdad. Two other bridges across the Tigris in that part of the capital are shut for security reasons while another is regarded by many residents as too dangerous to use.
”There is a conspiracy to isolate the two halves of Baghdad,” Parliament Speaker Mahmoud Mashhadani, an outspoken Sunni politician, told lawmakers.
A dozen bridges cross the Tigris in Baghdad, linking the east and west of the city.
Since the bombing of a revered Shi’ite shrine in the town of Samarra in February 2006, a wave of sectarian violence has reshaped the fabric of this once mixed city. Sunnis mainly live on the west side of the river and Shi’ites on the east.
Police said seven people had been killed in the bridge blast. They said up to 22 people were wounded. At least five cars had fallen into the river, including the police vehicle. – Reuters