Post by Moses on Jul 13, 2005 17:50:53 GMT -5
Twenty-four Iraqi children killed by car bomb
Wed Jul 13, 6:40 AM ET
Twenty-four Iraqi children were killed by a suicide car bomber targeting American soldiers handing out sweets after entering their Baghdad neighborhood precisely to warn of a possible attack.
Some 20 more children were wounded in the blast, while a US soldier died and three were injured, hospital and US sources said.
"A driver approached one of the US Humvees and then detonated his car," said Sergeant David Abrams.
Witness Mohammed Ali Hamza said US forces came to the Al-Jedidah district to warn residents to stay indoors because of reports of a car bomb in the area.
"Children gathered round the Americans who were handing out sweets. Suddenly a suicide car bomber drove round from a side street and blew himself up," he added.
"We have received the bodies of 24 children aged between 10 and 13," said the official in charge of the morgue at Kindi hospital.
Abu Hamed whose 12-year-old son Mohammed was killed, said "I was at home. I heard the explosion. I rushed outside to find my son. I only found his bicycle."
He was speaking at the hospital, where hundreds of distraught parents mingled in blood-soaked hallways shouting and screaming.
He said he had found his son in the hospital morgue.
"I recognized him from his head. The rest of the body was completely burnt."
Hassan Mohammed, whose 13-year-old son Alaa also died, swore at insurgents for attacking civilians.
"Why do they attack our children? They just destroyed one US Humvee, but they killed dozens of our children," he said as women screamed, slapped their faces and beat themselves over the head.
"What sort of a resistance is this? It's a crime," he added.
The last such attack involved a triple car bombing against US troops inaugurating a water treatment plant in western Baghdad on September 30. Forty-three people were killed, including 37 children who had gathered to take candy from the soldiers.
Meanwhile, a Sunni Muslim religious official said the tortured bodies of 11 Sunni Arabs, who had been killed execution-style with a bullet to the head, were found in Baghdad Tuesday after having been arrested by police commandos two days earlier.
The latest twist in growing tensions between Sunnis and the majority Shiite community comes as the top US general announced that a key aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leading Al-Qaeda operative in Iraq and a fanatic anti-Shiite, has been captured by US forces.
The Sunnis, including an imam prayer leader, were arrested in a police commando raid at their homes in northern Baghdad early Sunday, said the official of the Waqf religious organisation who did not want to be identified.
Their bodies were found dumped in the north of the city on Tuesday, he added and "all bore torture marks and bullet wounds to the back of the head."
Hussein Ali Kamal, deputy minister for intelligence at the interior ministry, told AFP it was not known who was responsible for the killings.
"The minister has issued orders that nobody be arrested without a warrant," he said.
"Every day we find innocent people killed and their bodies dumped in the streets. We don't know who's responsible. The minister has ordered that a special committee be set up to look into this very explosive issue.
"There are people who dress up in police or commandos uniforms to carry out, even at night, horrible attacks which are then blamed on police," he said.
The head of the Waqf, Adnan al-Dulaimi, called Wednesday for an official investigation into the case and asked that its results be made public.
"This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened," Dulaimi said in a statement. "We want to know who is responsible for such horrible crimes."
There have been numerous allegations of mistreatment and killings of Sunnis by special police forces over the past few months.
Sunni Arabs, dominant under the regime of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, are believed to provide the backbone to the current insurgency.
In Washington, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said a key aide to Zarqawi had been captured in what he described late Tuesday as a "pretty good success."
But General Richard Myers acknowledged that coalition troops in Iraq faced "a very dangerous insurgency" that is far from being on its death bed.
"Just yesterday on the battlefield, we picked up Zarqawi's main leader in Baghdad. They call him the Emir of Baghdad, Abu Abd al-Aziz, and that's going to hurt that operation of Zarqawi's pretty significantly," Myers said.
In other incidents Wednesday, two police were killed and six people wounded, including three police, in various attacks in and north of the capital.
Meanwhile, the Australian government announced that it will deploy about 150 elite troops to Afghanistan to fight a resurgence in rebel attacks but has no plans to send more soldiers to Iraq, where 900 are currently stationed.
And in Washington, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday he had not seen a British Ministry of Defense report on a major US-British troop reduction in Iraq in 2006, but the projected figures seemed "plausible."
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