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Iraq: Suicide bomber kills 150 in Kurdish village
7.7.2007 |
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July
7, 2007
TUZ KHORMATO, Iraq, -- A suicide truck bomb
ripped a Kurdish village market in a northern Iraq
Saturday, killing 150 people and wounding 250, said
Col. Abbas Mohammed Amin, the police chief of Tuz
Khurmatu.
The blast targeted the region’s ethnic Turkman
population on a weekend when a car bomb also killed
22 Shiite Kurds in neighboring Diyala province on
the Iranian border.
The two areas are fraught with tensions as Iraq’s
religious and ethnic groups compete for power.
The truck bomb Saturday struck an outdoor market in
Amerli, about 12 miles south of the city of Tuz
Khurmatu.
Shops and homes were destroyed, and people were
buried under the debris, police said.
Kurds are lobbying to make Tuz Khurmatu part of
Kurdistan through a provision of the Iraqi
constitution that calls for the settling of the
status of territories such as the oil-rich city of
Kirkuk, where Saddam Hussein displaced Kurds and
settled Arabs in the 1970s and 1980s.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki denounced on
Saturday the suicide bombing attack that targeted a
market in Tuz Khurmato district, accusing what he
named as "groups of terror and Tikfir" of hostility
to all communities of the Iraqi nation.
"The operation that targeted a popular market in Tuz
Khurmato district came in response to terrorism's
defeat in front of our armed troops,"
‘I don’t know the fate of my brother’
While residents and police dug through the wreckage
for hours, victims were ferried in farmers’ pickup
trucks 30 miles to the nearest hospital, in Tuz
Khormato.
Weeping and screaming relatives searched Tuz
Khormato’s hospital frantically for word of loved
ones. Ali Hussein read the names of victims being
moved further north to Kirkuk for treatment. “My
cousin died in the explosion, but I don’t know the
fate of my brother,” he said in tears.
Abdullah Jabara, deputy governor of Salahuddin
province where the town is located, told Iraqi state
television that 115 died—nearly three-quarters of
them women, children and elderly—and blamed al-Qaida.
Police gave a similar death toll, along with more
than 200 wounded, though Tuz Khormato’s police
chief, Col. Abbas Mohammed Amin, put the toll at 150
dead.
An alleged al-Qaida militant, meanwhile, was
executed for his role in one of Iraq's first major
bombings, an August 2003 blast that killed a Shiite
leader and 84 other people and foreshadowed the
four-year insurgency that followed, a Justice
Ministry official said Friday.
Oras Mohammed Abdul-Aziz was hanged Tuesday in
Baghdad after being sentenced to death in October,
Ministry Undersecretary Busho Ibrahim told The
Associated Press.
The execution announcement was the first word that a
suspect had been tried in the killing of Ayatollah
Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim.
Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility for the
attack - a huge car bomb that went off outside the
Shrine of Ali in Najaf, one of Shiite Islam's
holiest sites, and killed al-Hakim.
Al-Hakim was the leader of the Supreme Council for
the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and was poised to
become a major figure in Iraqi politics following
Saddam's fall. His brother, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, now
heads the group, the largest Shiite party in
parliament.
Ibrahim said Abdul-Aziz, from the northern city of
Mosul, was affiliated with al-Qaida in Iraq and
confessed to other attacks, including the 2004
killing of Abdel-Zahraa Othman, the president of the
Governing Council, the U.S.-appointed body that ran
Iraq following Saddam's ouster.
A church leader said gunmen waylaid a minibus
outside the northern city of Kirkuk and seized four
Christian men. Rt. Rev. Louis Saka, the Chaldean
Catholic archbishop in Kirkuk, said a 21-year-old
Christian woman was on the bus when it was stopped
south of the city Thursday but was released by the
captors, who are demanding a $40,000 ransom.
Thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled their homes
since the 2003 invasion because of threats by
Islamic extremists and criminal gangs.
AP
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