Five killed in Baghdad suicide car bomb

AT least five people were killed when a suicide car bomb struck central Baghdad as 44 people died in US air strikes near the insurgent bastion of Fallujah.

US-led local troops launched a crackdown yesterday on lawless zones in the capital, a day after the kidnapping of two Americans and a Briton in the heart of Baghdad that had increased fears among the jittery expatriate community.

The suicide bomber rammed an Iraqi police patrol passing through the al-Rashid commercial district and blew up his car, an interior ministry spokesman and police said.

“Five of my police colleagues were killed,” said First Lieutenant Jafaar Hussein, his shirt drenched in blood.

“The suicide bomber was driving a Chevrolet Malibu. He smashed his car against the police vehicle,” said Colonel Adnan Abdul Rahman. “Five people were killed and 20 others wounded in the attack, most of them policemen,” an official from the health ministry in charge of centralising casualty tolls said.

The usually teeming area was less crowded than usual due to the Muslim weekly day of rest in Iraq.

The explosion came three days after a car bomb outside the capital’s police headquarters left 49 people dead and after gunbattles raged in the radical bastion of Haifa Street, on the other side of the Tigris River.

Pockets of fighting flared yesterday after a driver tried to ram another explosives-rigged car into a Haifa Street checkpoint and the vehicle was blown up by gunfire, US military spokesman Major Philip Smith said.

The driver and possibly a second occupant of the car were killed, he added.

Helicopters hovered overhead and US armour rolled towards the site of the fighting and heavy machine-gun fire was heard up to four hours after the blast.

The trouble spot, where fierce clashes on Sunday left 13 people dead, was sealed off and the US spokesman said a joint US-Iraqi operation was ongoing in the area “to deny terrorists the ability to operate.”

West of Baghdad, several air raids hit the village of Zoba, just south of Fallujah, demolishing 13 houses, in what the US military described as an attack on a “terrorist compound” of suspected Al-Qaida operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. The health ministry said 44 people were killed and 27 wounded, while a doctor at the Fallujah general hospital said many of the victims were women and children.

As many as 60 foreign fighters were killed in one strike on a “confirmed Abu Musab Zarqawi terrorist meeting site,” the US military said, although it was impossible to independently verify the claim.

Meantime, on Thursday, two Americans and a Briton were snatched from their home in an upmarket Baghdad neighbourhood.

The operation, for which no one has claimed responsibility, was similar to one of two Italian aid workers and two Iraqis taken at gunpoint from their office in a quiet residential area of Baghdad earlier this month.

More than 100 foreigners are thought to have been abducted since April.