Baghdad

More blasts rocked Baghdad on Thursday, spreading yet more carnage during what was already Iraq’s worst week for bombings since the United States invasion, and as US casualties continued to mount. For the fourth time this year a bomb exploded in bustling Tehran Square in downtown Baghdad, wounding at least 20 day labourers waiting at a spot popular for seeking work.

At least 14 people were killed and 75 wounded in a car bomb attack in central Baghdad on Wednesday, which targeted the convoy of Industry Minister Fawzi al-Hariri, Interior Ministry sources said. Al-Hariri, a Kurd, was not in the convoy when it was attacked. Two of his bodyguards were among those killed, Dhuha Mohammed, an Industry Ministry spokesperson, said.

Iraqi forces placed Baghdad under a blanket curfew throughout Saturday after United States troops arrested a man suspected of plotting to attack the capital’s government compound with suicide car bombings. US troops arrested a security guard at the home of the leader of the main Sunni Arab political bloc on Friday.

Iraq’s government imposed a one-day curfew on the capital Baghdad on Saturday without explanation, ordering all cars and pedestrians off the streets. The United States military said it had arrested a man at the home of the leader of the main Sunni political bloc on suspicion of planning a series of car bomb attacks on the Green Zone, the vast government and diplomatic compound.

A brother-in-law of the judge trying Saddam Hussein for genocide was shot dead by gunmen while driving in western Baghdad, police said on Friday. A police source told Reuters that the 10-year-old nephew of chief judge Mohammed al-Ureybi and a third person in the car were wounded in the attack on Thursday evening.

Saddam Hussein was ejected from his genocide trial for a third day on Tuesday and his co-defendants tried to storm out after him, as chaos reined following the sacking of the chief judge last week. Judge Mohammed al-Ureybi had opened the hearing with a lecture to Saddam not to disrupt the proceedings.

Saddam Hussein lasted two hours in court on Monday before the judge threw him out of his genocide trial for the second time in as many sessions, as the former Iraqi president’s lawyers boycotted proceedings. Eight court-appointed lawyers stood in for the defence team, which stayed away in protest at the sacking last week by the Iraqi government of the previous chief judge.

A Kurdish farmer told a judge on Thursday how a furious Saddam Hussein shouted ”shut up and get out” when he pleaded for the life of his wife and seven young children, who were rounded up in their village in 1988. ”He told me to approach him and I begged him for their lives,” said Abdulla Mohammad Hussain.

The prosecutor in the genocide trial of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on Wednesday demanded that the chief judge resign, saying he was too lenient with defendants who had threatened lawyers and witnesses. ”Defendants have gone too far, with unacceptable expressions and words,” prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon said at the opening of the latest hearing.

A suicide bomber blew himself up inside a minibus full of Iraqi army recruits in Baghdad on Monday, killing 13 people and wounding seven, police said. Police said the bomber boarded the minibus outside the Muthanna base in central Baghdad and detonated his explosives.

The United States and Iraq hope to sign an agreement by next week to hand operational command of Iraq’s new army to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, an aide said on Monday, after wrangles on wording had held up the accord. Transferring security from US-led forces to the Iraqi army it is training is key to Washington’s plans to withdraw its 140 000 troops.

Iraq’s embattled coalition government was to set up a military headquarters to take command of its armed forces on Saturday, as a report from the Pentagon warned the country is close to civil war. The report painted a sombre picture of a still powerful anti-government insurgency and mounting Sunni-Shi’ite violence.

More than 40 people were killed in bomb attacks in Iraq on Wednesday morning, including 24 at a busy market in Baghdad where insurgents seem intent on defying a major United States-backed security clampdown now in its fourth week. A further 35 people were wounded in the attack on the Shorja wholesale market in central Baghdad, police said.

The top United States general in the Middle East praised a major security clampdown in Baghdad on Thursday and said Iraq was far from civil war. On a day when three car bombs and two roadside bombs killed four people and wounded 24 in the capital, General John Abizaid told reporters: ”I think there has been great progress on the security front in Baghdad recently.”

An Iraqi Kurd told Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial on Tuesday how jets dropped poison gas smelling of rotten apples on his mountain village and aides to the ousted leader defended his campaign against Kurdish rebels. Saddam refused to plead and called the court a tool of the occupation. The Shi’ite judge entered a not guilty plea for him.

Saddam Hussein refused to enter a plea as he and six former army commanders went on trial in Baghdad on Monday on charges of killing tens of thousands of Kurdish villagers in a genocide campaign in 1988. The former president again challenged the legitimacy of the United States-sponsored special tribunal.

Almost 2 000 bodies were taken to Baghdad’s morgue in July, the highest tally in five months of rising sectarian bloodshed that has forced the United States to boost troop levels in the capital to head off a civil war. Morgue assistant manager Dr Abdul Razzaq al-Obaidi said on Wednesday that about 90% had died violently.

Bomb attacks around Baghdad killed at least 19 people and wounded 80 on Tuesday as insurgents defied a security crackdown in the Iraqi capital. The first blast echoed around the city at dawn, when a roadside booby trap ripped open a minibus and a taxi in the downtown Nahda area, killing nine people and wounding eight, an interior ministry official said.

Iraqi soldiers arrested 64 suspected insurgents, mostly in northern provinces, as three people were killed in the country’s raging sectarian and political violence, officials said on Saturday. In the latest violence, Hassan Wannas, a former member of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, was killed in a drive-by shooting on Saturday.

Bombings and shootings killed up to 61 people in Iraq on Tuesday, including at least 26 soldiers, undermining the government’s attempts to show it can suppress unremitting violence. A roadside bomb attack on a bus filled with Iraqi troops on a road between Tikrit and Baiji, north of Baghdad, killed at least 23, the army said.

Bombs killed at least 40 people on Tuesday, half of them Iraqi soldiers, in the latest blow to the new government’s efforts to inspire confidence in the country’s security forces. The most dramatic blast was a roadside bomb attack on a bus filled with soldiers on a road between Tikrit and Baiji north of Baghdad. At least 20 of them were killed.

Gunmen wearing uniforms of Iraqi security forces kidnapped 25 people from an office in central Baghdad in broad daylight on Monday, police said. The gunmen pulled up in 15 four-wheel-drive vehicles and kidnapped employees and customers at the office on a street in Arasat, once a thriving commercial district.

The trial of Saddam Hussein and seven of his top lieutenants for crimes against humanity was adjourned on Thursday to October when the verdict carrying the maximum penalty of death is expected to be delivered. ”The court decided to adjourn the session … until October 16,” said Chief Judge Raouf Abdel Rahman.