IRAQ: Car bomb exploded at the entrance to a wholesale vegetable market in Baghdad, killing five people and wounding 19

A car bomb exploded at the entrance to a wholesale vegetable market in southern Baghdad on Monday (December 18), killing five people and wounding 19, police said. The blast took place in the mostly Sunni Saidiya district, police said. "We were standing here and people were shopping, all of them civilians, when a Corona car hit the guard and then blew up, sending people, women and children running away. They left their cars and shopping stuff and ran away," said Thamir Alwan, an eyewitness. Earlier, a roadside bomb also exploded near a vegetable market in the Sunni district of Doura in southern Baghdad, wounding seven people, police said. Markets are a common target for bombers in the worsening sectarian conflict between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunnis that has raised fears of all-out civil war. In the worst attack since the U.S. invasion in 2003, more than 200 people were killed last month in a string of carbomb blasts and a mortar barrage in the Shi'ite slum of Sadr City, a stronghold of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

ITN Source | December 18, 2006

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