27 die as car bomb destroys Baghdad hotel

A powerful car bomb destroyed a five-story Iraqi hotel housing foreigners in central Baghdad tonight, killing 27 people and leaving a jagged crater just days before the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.

Flames and heavy smoke shot skyward, igniting trees and nearby buildings as rescuers pulled bodies from the rubble and searched for other victims.

Dazed and wounded people stumbled from the wreckage. A father cradled his young daughter, who was limp in his arms. Coated in dust, some rescuers dug through the rubble with bare hands as ambulance workers stood by with orange stretchers.

The attack on the Mount Lebanon Hotel wounded 41 people, said Army Col. Ralph Baker of the 1st Armoured Division. He estimated the bomb contained 1,000lb of explosives.

Americans, Britons, Egyptians as well as other foreigners were staying at the hotel, said Baghdad resident Faleh Kalhan. But some residents in the area said they believed guests left the hotel a week ago after its management received threats. If true, many casualties were likely in nearby buildings.

The blast set at least eight cars on fire, one of which was hurled into a store. Some vehicles were little more than mangled piles of metal. The explosion blew bricks, air conditioners, furniture, wires and other debris hundreds of yards from the hotel.

“It was huge boom followed by complete darkness and then the red glow of a fire,” said 16-year-old Walid Mohammed Abdel-Maguid, who lives near the hotel.

An adjacent two-story complex of offices and shops was also badly damaged.

The Mount Lebanon was a so-called soft target because it did not have concrete blast barriers and other security measures of the kind that protect offices of the US-led coalition and other buildings where Westerners live and work.

The Bush administration offered prayers for the victims, but said such attacks would not change US policy.

“Democracy is taking root in Iraq and there is no turning back,” said Scott McClellan, White House spokesman. “This is a time of testing, but the terrorists will not prevail.”

After the blast, American forces and Iraqi ambulances hurried to the scene. Dozens of Iraqi police and US soldiers in Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles arrived and started to clear crowds.

Earlier, two US soldiers tried to help pull bodies from the wreckage of the hotel, but angry Iraqis pushed them back.

The blast shook the nearby Palestine Hotel, where many foreign contractors and journalists are based. It left a crater 20 feet wide and 10 feet deep. American forensic experts studied the scene.

Smaller, nearby buildings were badly damaged. The area of the blast, Karrada, is a mix of residential and commercial buildings.

The explosion damaged the nearby Swan Lake Hotel, home to many foreigners, including journalists. The blast left the bureau of Arabic Al-Jazeera satellite television in a shambles, with windows smashed and televisions hanging from cords.

“All of our offices in this hotel are nearly destroyed. I was typing some information for a story and the windows blew in and covered me,” said the bureau’s senior editor, Mohammed Abdul Rahim, a Syrian.

No one in the hotel appeared to be wounded.

Gwenaelle Lenoir, a reporter for French Channel 3 television, was dazed.

“We were just finishing mixing our story and we heard a very big boom and there were no more windows and no more lights,” she said.

Across the street from the hotel, the one-story house of a Christian family of seven was virtually destroyed. The bodies of a man and a woman were pulled from the rubble. A two-storey annex belonging to the Baghdad Hospital was in flames, with one side sheared off.

The blast startled occupants of the Green Zone, a heavily protected area that houses the headquarters of the US-led occupation across the Tigris river from the hotel.

“We felt the blast here, it was a huge blast,” US Army Col. Jill Morgenthaler said. “We’re a mile south of that and I thought it was striking next door.”

The attack took place just three days before the first anniversary of the start of the US-led war to topple Saddam Hussein. It occurred behind Firdaus Square, where a bronze statue of Saddam was felled on April 9 with the help of US Marines who had just entered the centre of the Iraqi capital.

Assailants, including suicide bombers, have repeatedly carried out bomb attacks in Iraq since August. The targets have included Iraqi police stations, army recruiting centres, the UN headquarters and the offices of the international Red Cross.

Earlier today, the Iraqi Governing Council asked the United Nations for help putting together a new government, a council spokesman said.

The council requested that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan send a UN team back to Iraq to help organise a government that would take over from the US-led coalition, said council spokesman Hamid al-Kafaai.

The letter sent by council president Mohammed Bahr al-Ulloum, a Shiite cleric, also requested technical assistance in preparation for a general election due by the end of January 2005.

“The Governing Council has asked that the United Nations offers advice to Iraq in the field of elections and the formation of a transitional government,” al-Kafaai said.

The United States has urged a UN role in the US-backed political process for Iraq, and coalition spokesman Dan Senor welcomed news of the invitation.

The announcement of the invitation, decided in a council meeting today, followed remarks to reporters by Bahr al-Ulloum’s deputy that Iraq’s most powerful Shiite cleric and his supporters on the US-appointed Governing Council were unhappy with a UN report last month that found Iraq unready for elections ahead of June 30.

Sami al-Askari said several council members did not think the return to Iraq of UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi would be helpful and that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani would not receive him if he returned.

Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister, was in Iraq last month at the head of a team of UN experts to investigate whether elections could be held before June 30. In a report, he said such a vote was not feasible, giving reasons long cited by Washington – no electoral structure, no reliable census and an untenable security situation.

Today, US and Iraqi military forces launched a large operation to weed out insurgents and seize illegal weapons in Baghdad, with troops, helicopters and armoured vehicles raiding a suspected arms market.

The raid on the market came during a week in which gunmen, in two separate attacks, killed two Europeans and four American missionaries working on water projects. The six killings suggest the insurgents are going after civilians to undermine reconstruction efforts.

Also today, a home-made bomb exploded in central Baghdad, wounding a US soldier and two Iraqi security personnel. Insurgents also used dynamite to damage an overpass on the main highway leading from Baghdad to Jordan, causing it to partly collapse and block one side of the road.