Iraqi parliament speaker escapes car bomb

Iraq’s largest Sunni-Arab political party today condemned a car bomb attack inside Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone that apparently attempted to kill Iraq’s controversial speaker of parliament.

The small bomb exploded yesterday afternoon at the back of an armoured car in the motorcade of the Sunni speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, as it was driving into a car park near the Green Zone's convention centre, where al-Mashhadani and other Iraqi legislators were meeting, a parliamentary aide said.

After the blast, which slightly wounded the American security guard driver, he got out, examined the car and found other explosive devices planted beneath it, the aide said.

The driver called US soldiers who brought bomb sniffing dogs to the scene that detected explosives in another vehicle in the car park belonging to al-Mashhadani’s motorcade.

Bomb specialists detonated that car, which set off a series of blasts that caused a fire but injured no one and caused no major damage to nearby structures, the aide said.

The serious security breach in the Green Zone – which houses the Iraqi government, the US and British embassies and thousands of foreign troops and private contractors – forced the Iraqi legislators to stay inside the convention centre for several hours until the fire was put out and the area found to be safe, the aide said.

“We strongly condemn this act,” Ammar Wajih, the chief spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni-Arab party in Iraq, said today.

“To plant a bomb in a heavily guarded place near the parliament building is a big security breach because few authorised persons can enter this area. The aim of this act is to hamper the political process.”

US president George Bush and Iraqi prime minister Nouri Maliki announced they will meet on November 29-30 in Jordan to discuss the deteriorating security situation in Iraq.

“We will focus our discussions on current developments in Iraq, progress made to date in the deliberations of a high-level joint committee on transferring security responsibilities, and the role of the region in supporting Iraq,” they said in a statement.

A roadside bomb killed five policemen and wounded one in Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, yesterday, and gunmen killed four policemen in Baqouba, 35 miles north-east of the capital, police said.

In Latifiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad, a raid by Iraqi commandos detained 24 suspected insurgents.

Mashhadani, a hard-line Sunni Arab nationalist reviled by many Shiites, was the fourth high-ranking Iraqi government official to be targeted by assailants in recent days.

On Monday, Minister of State Mohammed Abbas Auraibi, a member of Iraq’s Shiite majority, said a roadside bomb hit his convoy as it was driving on a highway in eastern Baghdad. He escaped injury but his bodyguards were wounded.

Hakim al-Zamily, a Shiite deputy health minister, also escaped unhurt when gunmen opened fire on his convoy in downtown Baghdad on Monday, killing two of his guards.

On Sunday, deputy health minister Ammar al-Saffar was kidnapped from his home in northern Baghdad, police said.

Also, a lower-ranking official, Saad Kharbet Rashid, an assistant to a general manager at the Health Ministry, was killed by gunmen in downtown Baghdad yesterday and his driver wounded, police said.

Last summer, Shiite and Kurdish parties organised an unsuccessful bid to oust al-Mashhadani as parliament speaker after his comments about the insurgency and regional self-rule angered and embarrassed key political groups. He called the US occupation of Iraq “the work of butchers".

On November 1, al-Mashhadani had to be physically restrained from attacking a Sunni lawmaker. The speaker had been holding a nationally televised news conference when he lashed out at the legislator, Abdel-Karim al-Samarie, for alleged corruption and failure to attend sessions, calling him a “dog” – a deep insult in Iraq and other Arab societies.

“You are dishonest and a dog,” screamed al-Mashhadani.

Al-Samarie, a member of the main Sunni parliamentary bloc, the Iraqi Accordance Front, responded by calling al-Mashhadani a false patriot. The speaker, who belongs to an allied Sunni group – The National Dialogue Council - lunged at al-Samarie, but was held back by bodyguards.

Al-Mashhadani then moved on to the parliament’s main chamber, where he accosted other Sunni Accordance Front lawmakers, calling them “villains” and “dogs", and accusing them of colluding with the former Baath Party of toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.

Al-Mashhadani had been angered by low attendance among Iraqi Accordance Front lawmakers that prevented the 275-seat body from making the quorum of 138 of the 275 lawmakers.