Suicide car bomber kills two Iraqis in Baghdad

A suicide car bomber killed two Iraqis and wounded five today in an attack on a police patrol in an area of Baghdad where insurgents had kidnapped and murdered a defence lawyer in Saddam Hussein’s trial last week, police said.

The bomb exploded at 6.30am local time in the north-eastern neighbourhood of Shaab, killing two policemen and wounding three policemen and two civilians, said police Lt. Malik Sultan.

In Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, a roadside bomb exploded at 8.30am near a car carrying Ibrahim Zangana, a senior member of Iraq’s Kurdish Democratic Party, seriously wounding him, killing one of his bodyguards and injuring another one, said Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir, the commander of Kirkuk’s police force.

Yesterday, more than 20 Iraqis died in a swell of violence in Iraq, including a bomb that killed a police colonel and four children. The toll among American service members in Iraq was approaching 2,000 dead.

But the US military said it has hampered insurgents’ ability to unleash more devastating suicide bombings with a series of offensives in western towns that disrupted militant operations.

“We have interrupted the flow of the suicide missions into the large urban areas. Certainly, we have had success denying free movement of car bombs into Baghdad,” Brig. Gen. Donald Alston told reporters in the capital.

“It is also a function of Iraqi citizens who have come forward and with their support we have found car bomb factories. We have found a series of large weapon caches,” he said.

Last Thursday, 10 gunmen wearing police and military uniforms kidnapped Sunni Arab Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, one of the defence lawyers in the trial of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein and seven former officials from his Sunni-dominated regime.

Al-Janabi, the lawyer for Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former head of Saddam’s Revolutionary Court, was taken from his office in the Shaab area, and hours later his tortured and bullet-ridden body was found on a sidewalk by the Fardous Mosque in the nearby Ur neighbourhood.

The 12 remaining Saddam trial defence lawyers have since rejected an offer from the Interior Ministry for better security, demanding protection from American officials instead.

Also yesterday, investigative judges took testimony from the first witness in the Saddam mass murder trial regarding the 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail.

The judges went to a military hospital to take the deposition from Wadah Ismail al-Sheik, a cancer patient who was director of the investigation department at Saddam’s feared Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the Dujail massacre. Al-Sheik is too sick to appear in court, and officials did not want to wait until the trial resumes on November 28 to get his testimony.

In another development, the US military yesterday confirmed that four American contract workers were killed and two wounded in Iraq last month when their convoy got lost.

The attack occurred on September 20 when the convoy, which included US military guards riding in Humvees, made a wrong turn into the mostly Sunni Arab town of Duluiyah, 45 miles north of Baghdad.

Insurgents opened fire with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, said Maj. Richard Goldenberg, a spokesman for Task Force Liberty in north-central Iraq.

Alerted to the attack, a quick-reaction team went to the scene, finding all four Americans still in their vehicles with bullet wounds, one of them burned from a fire in the vehicle. One was still alive but died later of his wounds, the military said. Two others were wounded and survived the attack.