11 dead in car bomb blast

A parked car exploded near a market in central Baghdad on today, killing at last 11 people and wounding about 40, police said.

The blast occurred on the Wathba Square near the Sadriyah market, one of the main commercial areas in the capital.

Police said three officers were among the 11 people killed and four were among the 43 wounded.

Sadriyah has been hit by several blasts usually blamed on suspected Sunni insurgents targeting commercial areas to kill as many people as possible in their bid to derail a US-Iraqi security crackdown that began more than 12 weeks ago.

On April 18, 127 people were killed in a car bombing in the same area.

In other violence today a suicide truck bomber crashed into the offices of a Kurdish political party in Makhmur, northern Iraq, and detonated his explosives amid a meeting of local security commanders, killing at least 10 people and injuring 60, including the mayor who was in his nearby office, Iraqi officials said.

The attack badly damaged the office of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, leader of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Makhmur is not part of the Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Iraq.

Among those killed was a local police chief, police said.

And Iraqi gunmen drove into a crowded market in Baqouba, north of the capital, pulled two handcuffed men out of the boot and shot and killed them in a display meant to send a message to residents not to co-operate with US-led forces, police and witnesses said.

“This is the destiny of traitors,” the gunmen yelled as they shot their victims.

The US military also confirmed that an Iraqi interpreter was killed along with four American soldiers in an attack south of Baghdad yesterday – confirming that three missing after the ambush were all Americans.

The military had announced that a patrol of seven US soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter was attacked before dawn near Mahmoudiya and that five people were dead and three were missing.

Mahmoudiya is about 20 miles south of Baghdad in an al Qaida area known as the “triangle of death.”