Suicide bomber kills six in Baghdad
It was the latest in a string of attacks on Western targets in Iraq, which the United States blames on Iraqi and foreign guerrillas resisting the American-led occupation.
It also coincided with the anniversaries of two major international attacks by Muslim militants on Western targets, in Bali last year and off the Yemeni coast in 2000. Eyewitnesses said a car crashed through the security barrier at the heavily-fortified Baghdad Hotel and exploded.
The hotel is widely thought to be used by members of the CIA, officials of the US-led coalition and their Iraqi partners in the Governing Council as well as US contractors. A US official in Washington said: “It is not a CIA facility.”
“I saw limbs and pieces of flesh everywhere,” security guard Kahin Hussein said. “The US soldiers were picking them up off the floor.”
A US military spokesman said six people had died, all Iraqi. An Iraqi policeman said 10 people were killed. At nearby hospitals, people in bloodied clothes waited for treatment, relatives trying to swat at the flies hovering around them.
One hospital said it had treated 33 wounded people, another saw 19. Lying in a hospital bed in a bloodstained vest and shorts, hotel guard Ali Adel said he had opened fire on the car as it sped toward the hotel.
“The vehicle was coming toward the barrier at high speed,” he said, as he waited for surgery for shrapnel wounds. “I took two shots at it and then it blew up.”
Iraqi police chief Ahmad Ibrahim said the attack on a hotel filled with Americans and other foreigners was aimed at driving Iraq’s occupiers out of the country.
“Maybe it was al-Qaida or (Saddam’s) Ba’ath party,” he told Reuters. “They thought if they did this the Americans would be afraid and leave Iraq.”
The attack took place exactly a year after the bombing of two nightclubs on the Indonesian island of Bali which killed 202 people and three years to the day since an explosives-laden rubber raft rammed a US destroyer in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 US soldiers.
It deals a further blow to President Bush who is trying to bolster support for his decision to invade Iraq by highlighting postwar successes. Recent polls show his popularity tumbling as the cost of the war in both lives and money continues to mount.
