An injured Iraqi boy stands at the scene of a suicide car bomb attack in Baghdad, July 13 2005 (AP)
BAGHDAD(AP)- Suicide bombers struck near the Green Zone in central Baghdad on Thursday but a third was wounded and captured by U.S. and Iraqi security forces, officials said. At least nine people were wounded in the blasts.
The coordinated attacks by a suicide car bomber and another man wearing a vest with explosives occurred one day after a horrific blast at a poor east Baghdad neighborhood that killed 18 children and teenagers who had swarmed around a U.S. Humvee to get candy and toys.
Up to 27 people died in the Wednesday blast, including one American soldier.
The Thursday attacks took place at a checkpoint near the Green Zone, where the U.S. Embassy and Iraqi government offices are located.
"Two bombers approached the checkpoint shortly before 9 a.m. (0500 GMT) after a car bomb exploded near the same checkpoint," a U.S. military statement said. "A suicide bomber detonated himself and the other suicide bomber tried to run away from the scene. Iraqi police shot the man and were evacuating him when they discovered the vest" packed with explosives.
An Iraqi bomb squad team disarmed the explosives, the military said.
Police initially reported that they had killed the third bomber. The suicide bombing Wednesday stunned the largely Shiite neighborhood. Terrified parents rushed outdoors after the bombing to find the bloodied, mangled bodies of their children scattered along the street.
Twelve of the dead were 13 years or younger and six were between 14 and 17, police Lt. Mohammed Jassim Jabr said. Among the wounded was 4-day-old Miriam Jabber, cut slightly by flying glass and debris. Elsewhere, security forces discovered the bodies of 10 men handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the head, police said Thursday.
The bodies of men aged between 25 and 35 were found Wednesday night in the Maamel area on the eastern outskirts of Baghdad, said police Lt. Osama Adnan. They had no identity papers, he added.
The discovery occurred amid increasing tension between the country”s Sunni Muslim minority and the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. It was not clear if the dead men were Sunnis or Shiites, who make up the majority in Iraq. The influential Sunni Muslim Association of Muslim Scholars and the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country”s largest Sunni political group, said they had no information about the incident.
On Wednesday, the association accused Iraqi security forces of detaining, torturing and killing 11 Sunni Arab men, including a cleric.
Sunni groups also accused security forces of allowing at least nine Sunnis detained last weekend to suffocate after locking them for hours in a van without ventilation as temperatures soared to 46C(115 F).
The Iraqi Interior Ministry said both allegations are being investigated, and if true, those responsible will be punished. There had been tit-for-tat killings between Sunnis and Shiites in the past. In May, 10 clerics from both sects were killed as well as dozens of followers from both groups. In other violence Thursday, two bands of gunmen in western Baghdad and near the northern city of Kirkuk killed three policemen each, authorities said. Another group of assailants killed police Capt. Manhal Salim, an expert in defusing bombs, shortly before midnight in the capital.
The body of another policeman with gunshots to the head was found late Wednesday, also in western Baghdad.
More than 1,600 people have been killed in violence since April 28, when al-Jaafari announced his Shiite-led government in a country trying to crush an insurgency whose foundation is made up of Sunnis.
In Washington, the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, warned Wednesday that both foreign terrorists and Iraqi insurgents linked to Saddam Hussein”s Baath party were trying to foment civil war. Saddam, a Sunni, was the minority sect”s last patron before his ouster in 2003.
"The foreign terrorists … see the Iraqi people, including Iraqi children, as cannon fodder to be sacrificed in the pursuit of an extremist agenda of conflict between civilizations," Khalilzad told reporters. "Hard-line Baathists want a civil war as a vehicle to restore their dictatorship, and if they cannot win power, to take Iraq down with them.»
Iraqi relatives of an 11-year-old boy scream out his name at the scene of a suicide car bomb attack in Baghdad, July 13 2005, (AP)
Injured by flying glass in a suicide bomb attack, 4-day-old baby Miriam Jabbar is held by her mother as they arrive at an Iraqi hospital, 13 July 2005 (AP)