A suicide bomber killed eight people in the Iraqi Parliament on Thursday, slipping through multiple checkpoints in a brazen strike that challenged a major United States-backed security crackdown in Baghdad.
US military spokesperson Major General William Caldwell said initial reports showed eight had been killed and 20 wounded in the blast, which tore through a café where lawmakers were having lunch. State television said three of the dead were lawmakers.
It was the most serious breach of security yet in the Green Zone, the sprawling, heavily protected area in central Baghdad that houses Parliament, government offices and the US embassy.
US President George Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who is on a trip to the Far East, condemned the attack, which Caldwell blamed on Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda.
Officials have named one of the lawmakers who died as Mohammed Awadh, a member of the Accordance Front, the biggest Sunni bloc in Parliament.
”We were having a meeting when suddenly we heard a huge blast inside the restaurant. I saw a lot of MPs wounded and bleeding,” said Fouad al-Massoum, leader of the Kurdish bloc. He said security officials, fearing there might be a second explosion, ordered everyone out of the building.
The bold attack by a suicide bomber wearing an explosives vest came despite a two-month-old operation by thousands of US and Iraqi troops in the capital regarded as a last chance to stop a slide to full-scale sectarian civil war.
Earlier, a truck bomb killed at least seven people on a main 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.
”I saw a ball of fire and heard a huge, loud explosion. There were pieces of flesh floating in the air,” said the witness, who was lightly wounded in the arm.
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 the bridge that local residents said was built by the British in the early 1900s.
Among the dead were four police officers 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,” parliamentary 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 last year, 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
Additional reporting by Aseel Kami, Ahmed Rasheed, Yara Bayoumy, Ross Colvin and Aws al-Rubaie