A catering company that recently took over the franchise at the Iraqi Parliament was on Friday at the centre of the investigation into Thursday’s bombing.
Police detained three food workers for questioning as MPs said there had been complaints about the new catering service. But senior security officials said that they also had not ruled out the possibility that the bomber was a bodyguard of a member of the entourage of a Sunni Arab MP. Iraqi security forces guarding the building were also under suspicion. One official said he was ”almost certain this was in part an inside job. There are some figures here with one foot in the political process and one in the insurgency”.
A senior Sunni political leader recently told the Guardian: ”I know my entourage has been infiltrated. It is getting very, very difficult to spot.”
MPs gathered for an extraordinary parliamentary ”session of defiance and unity” as initial reports of eight dead were revised to one, with 20 injured.
MPs began by reading verses of the Qu’ran to mourn the victim, Mohammed Awadh, a Sunni MP. A bouquet of flowers was placed at his seat in the assembly chamber. ”We hope that some good will come out of this tragedy, that it will be a step forward for unity and that we will work together to serve the people … and achieve national reconciliation,” said MP Safia al-Suheil.
”This is undeniably a difficult blow, but it should unify us to confront the evil of terrorism and it proves that terrorism is indiscriminate — Sunnis, Shias, Kurds and Arabs were maimed in this attack,” said Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih.
A senior government source said three workers at the cafe had been detained for questioning, but no charges had been brought. MPs who spoke to the Guardian on Friday said that they were employees of a private catering company that had only been operating inside Parliament for about a month. The government source said the company was ”100% staffed by Sunnis” and had replaced another company that had been almost solely Shia. One theory has suggested that equipment for explosives was smuggled in over a period of time in food containers.
The MPs said they had complained to the Parliament’s administrative committee about the new franchise. The attack was claimed on Friday by the Islamic State in Iraq, an umbrella Sunni militant organisation with links to al-Qaeda. – Guardian Unlimited Â