IRAQ: Baghdad bus station car bombs kill 6 while suicide car bomber kills 22 labourers south of Baghdad

Three near simultaneous explosions, at least two of them car bombs, killed at least six people and wounded 30 at a bus station in mainly Shi'ite east Baghdad on Sunday (November 19), police and Interior Ministry sources said. One Interior Ministry source said the coordinated attack on the Mashtel bus garage, near the New Baghdad district, involved three car bombs. Another source in the ministry and one at police headquarters said the nature of the third device was unclear. One source said 35 people had been wounded at that the death toll could rise. "Cars were damaged and people were hurt. We do not know why? There were no policemen only civilians. There were no Iraqi army and no Americans," said Ali, an eyewitness. Earlier, a suicide bomber killed 22 people south of Baghdad after gathering a crowd of poor Shi'ite workers around his minibus by offering them day labouring jobs and then detonating explosives packed inside. A spokesman for police in the mainly Shi'ite city of Hilla, 100 km (60 miles) south of the capital, said 49 people were wounded in the early morning blast, when hot shrapnel tore through the expectant crowd as men jostled to come closer. The tactic has been used before by al Qaeda-linked Sunni militants at spots where men congregate in the hope of casual work. Hilla is often a target for attacks, including the bloodiest single bombing since the U.S. invasion, in which a suicide car bomber killed 125 people in February 2005. "We are labourers and all of a sudden there was a blast and we all ran away," said a wounded labourer. The blast came against a backdrop of continuing bloodshed between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunnis that has killed thousands of Iraqis and raised fears that the country is teetering on the edge of all-out civil war. Hilla, close to the site of ancient Babylon, is surrounded by Sunni rural areas that are havens for insurgents and al Qaeda suicide bombers. It has seen some of the deadliest sectarian bomb attacks over the past two years, including the bloodiest single blast in Iraq, when 125 people, many of them police recruits, were killed by a suicide car bomber in February 2005. In August, a bomb apparently left on a parked bicycle blasted a crowd of young Iraqi men outside an army recruiting office killing 12 people. Sunday's blast followed the killing of a prominent Shi'ite Islamist politician on Saturday (November 18) in what looked like a sectarian assassination. Ali al-Adhadh of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) was shot dead with his wife as he drove in mainly Sunni west Baghdad. Minority Sunni Arabs were enraged last week after a warrant of arrest was issued for leading Iraqi Sunni cleric Harith al-Dari on charges of inciting terrorism, accusing the Shi'ite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki sectarianism. Maliki's six-month-old national unity government has struggled to curb the rampant sectarian violence gripping Iraq but is coming under growing U.S. pressure to show some progress in reaching a political accommodation with Sunnis and reining in militias blamed for much of the bloodshed. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appealed to Iraqis not to let the sectarianism destroy their country. Rice said during a visit to Vietnam on Saturday that Iraqis "have one future and that is a future together. They don't have a future if they try to stay apart".

ITN Source | November 19, 2006

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