Twin Iraq mosque blasts kill scores
Friday 18 November 2005, 16:39 Makka Time, 13:39 GMT
Two bombers have blown themselves up among worshippers at two Shia mosques in Khanaqin, northeast of Baghdad, killing at least 65 people and wounding 75 others.
The attackers targeted the Shaikh Murad mosque and the Khanaqin Grand Mosque while people were attending Friday prayers. The police said the death toll could rise.
Khanaqin, located near the Iranian border 140km from the capital, is a majority Kurdish town.
Also on Friday, two car bombs exploded earlier in a central Baghdad
residential neighbourhood, located between an Interior Ministry
building and the al-Hamra Hotel occupied by foreign journalists. At
least six people were killed and 43 injured in the blasts.
Twin blasts
"What we have here
appears to be two suicide car bombs(that) attempted to breach the
security wall in the vicinity of the hotel complex and I think the
target was the al-Hamra Hotel," US Brigadier-General Karl Horst
told reporters at the scene.
The blasts - less
than a minute apart -reverberated throughout the city centre, sent
a mushroom cloud hundreds of feet into the air and was followed by
sporadic small arms fire. At first the target appeared to be the
Interior Ministry building nearby where US troops found about 170 detainees, some of whom appeared to be tortured.
Firefighters and US troops joined neighbours to dig through the debris and under toppled blast barriers to pull victims from the rubble.
Copycat bombings
Associated
Press Television News footage showed several residential buildings
collapsed from the blast and a large crater in the road.
But
US soldiers said the attack was a copycat of a car bombing against
journalists in the Palestine Hotel last month, with the first car bomb
attempting to knock down the hotel's defensive wall and the second
vehicle trying to penetrate the breach.
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Defence workers tried to pull
victims out of the rubble |
"They tried to knock down the wall to get to the hotel," said Sergeant-Major Stanley, who did not give his first name.
"There are a lot of casualties and a lot of damage."
Deputy
Interior Minister Major-General Ali Ghalib said the Interior Ministry
building is very close to the al-Hamra Hotel but he believed the hotel
was the target.
"The hotel is fortified and the shelter is fortified," Ghalib said.
"It
was random explosions because the suicide attacker could not reach the
target and that is the reason why the damage was in a civilian
building," he said.
"I think that the hotel was targeted because foreigners usually stay there," Ghalib said.
Also on Friday, armed men attacked US and Iraqi troops in western Iraq, setting off gunbattles that left 32 attackers dead, a US military statement said.
One marine and an Iraqi soldier suffered minor injuries during the attack, the US forces said. Most of the fighting took place around a mosque in the centre of the town.
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