49 killed in Iraq bomb blasts

Bomb blasts in two areas of Iraq today left at least 49 people dead and dozens more wounded.

In the first attack a suicide truck bomber crashed into the offices of a Kurdish political party, killing at least 32 people and wounding scores, including a mayor, officials said. It was the second suicide attack in Kurdish areas of the north in four days.

A parked car bomb also exploded near a market in central Baghdad today, killing at least 17 Iraqis, wounding 46 and damaging shops, police said.

Meanwhile, an al-Qaida front group claimed it had captured several US soldiers in an attack a day earlier south of Baghdad that killed five and left three missing.

The US said 4,000 troops were searching the farming area south of the capital for any sign of the three missing American soldiers.

In a statement posted on an Islamic website, the Islamic State of Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attack in Mahmoudiya and said it held an unspecified number of US soldiers. The group offered no proof to back up its claim but promised more details later.

The search for the missing Americans began after insurgents attacked a patrol of seven US soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter before dawn yesterday.

US spokesman Maj Gen William Caldwell said about 4,000 US troops were involved in the search.

“Everybody is fully engaged, the commanders are intimately focused on this, every asset we have from national assets to tactical assets … are being used … to locate these three missing soldiers,” he said.

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

Two US soldiers were found massacred there last year after they disappeared at a checkpoint.

The suicide truck bomb attack in Makhmur, 30 miles south of Irbil, badly damaged the office of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, leader of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Makhmur is just south of the autonomous Kurdish-controlled areas, but it has a substantial Kurdish population.

The blast also killed the police chief and damaged the mayor’s office, officials said.

Ziryan Othman, the health minister of the Kurdish regional government, said at least 32 people were killed and 115 were wounded, including the city’s mayor, Abdul Rahman Delaf, who also is a prominent Kurdish writer, and the director of the KDP office.

In Baghdad, the parked car exploded near a popular market in central of the city, killing at least 17 people and wounding 46, police said. The blast occurred on the Wathba Square near the Sadriyah market, one of the main commercial areas in the capital.

Iraqi and US soldiers were securing the area.

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.

In a separate attack, Iraqi gunmen drove into the Diyala capital of Baqouba, pulled two handcuffed men out of the trunk and shot and killed them, police and witnesses said.

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

Three other civilians were also killed execution-style in a market in the city centre, police said.