Baghdad restaurant bomb toll rises

A car bomb that destroyed a Baghdad restaurant crowded with New Year’s Eve revellers killed eight people and wounded 35 including one Briton and two Americans, the US military said today.

No group claimed responsibility for last night’s bombing, which came despite tightened security amid warnings of possible holiday terror attacks.

Later in the evening, a bomb hidden in shrubs outside a separate restaurant in Baghdad exploded as a US military convoy passed, wounding three American soldiers and three Iraqi civilians.

At Nabil restaurant, Lt Col Peter Jones of the 1st Armoured Division, said he pulled four bodies from the rubble, and that Iraqi police later found another four bodies in the rubble of the destroyed building.

“The glass came flying. Everything else blew up. People were blown apart,” said Basam Sarhan, a 25-year-old baker working in the kitchen at the back of the restaurant, located in an exclusive Baghdad neighbourhood.

Colonel Ralph Baker, division commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Armoured Division, said the blast was caused by a car booby-trapped with about 500 pounds of explosives.

He said reports that it was a suicide bomb attack were “not true”, and that witnesses said they saw a man running from a vehicle before the explosion.

The Los Angeles Times said three of its reporters and five local staff members suffered cuts and other wounds that did not appear life-threatening in the attack.

The reporters were Chris Kraul, from the newspaper’s Mexico City bureau, Tracy Wilkinson, the paper’s Rome bureau chief and correspondent Ann Simmons, a Briton who was formerly the Times’ bureau chief in Nairobi, Kenya.

Salar Jaff, The Times’ Baghdad bureau office manager, was driving to the restaurant behind three cars carrying his colleagues when the blast hit.

After the explosion, helicopters buzzed overhead as ambulances and US soldiers converged on the Nabil restaurant, a popular spot with foreigners that advertised a New Year’s Eve party with live music and belly dancing.

Five Iraqis were killed, according to Lt Gen Ahmed Kadhem, deputy Iraqi interior minister and Baghdad chief of police. The wounded included 32 Iraqis and several Westerners, police and hospital officials said.

“The people who are carrying out such attacks do not discriminate about the place,” said Police Brigadier Hamid Alyasiry. “They want to frighten everyone to create terror.”

One witness, Ahmed Hassanain, said a white Toyota Corolla car drove by the area five or six times before the bombing. The last time it passed, he said, the guard at the restaurant shot at it. It drove away. Two minutes later, there was an explosion. He said he did not know whether it was the Corolla that blew up.

“These people are terrorists,” Hassanain said. “Nobody here supports them.”