25 dead in Iraq funeral bombing
02 May, 2005
MOSUL, May 02(Online): A suicide car bomb ripped through a Kurdish funeral in northern Iraq on Sunday, killing 25 people and wounding 30, as a new hostage crisis erupted with an Australian pleading for his life in a new videotape.
Another 13 Iraqis were killed in relentless violence around the country, but officials announced they had found new evidence on the mysterious disappearance of British aid worker Margaret Hassan with the arrest of several suspects.
The bomber ploughed his vehicle into mourners gathered for the funeral of a Kurdish official in the northern city of Tall Afar at around 6:00 pm, a source at the Kurdistan Democratic Party told AFP. "Twenty-five people were killed and more than 30 wounded in the attack," said Khusru Kuran, who is also deputy governor of the northern Nineveh province.
The mourners were gathered in Tall Afar for the funeral of Taleb Sayed Wahba, also a KDP official, who was gunned down by militants in Mosul on Saturday.
Clashes then broke out when gunmen emerged on the scene of the bombing and prevented ambulances from evacuated the victims before being confronted by army and police forces, Khursu added.
In the ongoing violence, five Iraqi police were killed when a group of around 30 insurgents stormed a checkpoint on the southern edge of the capital, taking them by surprise, an interior ministry official said.
Militants loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said they carried out the attack, in a statement posted on the Internet.
Five Iraqi civilians, including a young girl, were also killed and 12 wounded in southeast Baghdad when a car bomb exploded as a US military convoy drove by, the official said. In a second Baghdad car bomb targeting a US military convoy, a child was killed and 10 civilians wounded. A Baghdad municipal official in charge of the sewage system was also gunned down in his car, while two men working for an Iraqi construction company were also shot dead in Baghdad.
A loud explosion was heard in central Baghdad on late Sunday killing one person. The US military had no immediate information on what could have caused the blast. Some 20 minutes later, another explosion rocked the same area, sending more white smoke into the air.
Meanwhile, militants issued a tape of an Australian taken hostage in Iraq, the latest victim of a kidnapping crisis. The tape came on the day US and Iraqi forces detained several men thought to be linked to the killing of a British hostage, aid worker Margaret Hassan, who was seized last year.
On the video released on Sunday, a man identifying himself as Douglas Wood, a 63-year-old Australian who lives in California, appealed to the United States, Britain and Australia to pull their troops out of Iraq and spare his life.
"Please help me. I don’t want to die," he says, sitting on the floor as two masked men armed with assault rifles and wearing bullet proof vests stand to either side of him. The authenticity of the tape, which carries the banner of a previously identified group calling itself the Shura Council of the Mujahideen in Iraq, could not be verified.
Five suspects arrested by Iraqi forces have confessed to the kidnapping and murder of British aid worker Margaret Hassan last year, an interior ministry official said. "They have confessed to taking part in the kidnapping and death of Margaret Hassan," the official told AFP.
The five were among a group of 11 suspects detained when US-backed Iraqi forces carried out two separate raids on the southern outskirts of the capital and found documents and items of clothing belonging to Hassan, he said.
Hundreds of US and Iraqi soldiers swept through this village on Sunday, searching homes, detaining insurgent suspects and taking their weapons.
At a time of stepped-up attacks by insurgents in Iraq, the operation in Udaim was one of several raids by coalition forces in Iraq this week aimed at cracking down on militants.
In the Fallujah-Ramadi area, west of Baghdad, US Marines and Iraqi troops discovered multiple caches this week, including thousands of mortar rounds, over 600 grenades and 200 pounds of explosives, the military said. No arrests were made in those seizures, which the military said were the largest in the embattled Anbar province in over a year.
End.
|
