Suicide bomb kills four in Iraq

A suicide bomber killed himself and at least four more people in Iraq yesterday, as foreign aid workers agonised over whether to quit the country in the aftermath of Monday's 35-death bloodbath in Baghdad.

The latest of a wave of suicide bombers blew up his small car outside a school 100 metres from a police station in the town of Falluja west of Baghdad, in the "Sunni Triangle" where resistance to US occupation is stiffest.

US soldiers sealed off the area after the blast, which set cars ablaze and scattered body parts across the street. A bloodied corpse lay by a lamp post covered in a blue blanket.

Police initially said the bomber and four civilians had died. Hospital officials later put the toll at six, including the attacker.

Suicide bombers attacked three stations of the US-backed police force in Baghdad on Monday, along with the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Police foiled an attempt to bomb a fourth police station.

Faris al-Assam, the deputy mayor of Baghdad, was killed in a drive-by shooting on Sunday night, the US-led occupying coalition said yesterday.

The ICRC's scrupulous political neutrality was no protection against a campaign of violence which seems to have been launched against not only US forces, officials and Iraqis working with them, but foreign organisations of any kind.

US President George W. Bush, seeking re-election next year amid growing criticism of his Iraq policy, said terrorists were retaliating for US successes in Iraq.

Spokeswoman Nada Doumani said the ICRC was weighing its response to the mayhem but would not leave Iraq after 23 years of continuous work through three wars.

"Today is a day of mourning for us," she told reporters. Many ICRC staff were at the funerals yesterday of two colleagues who were among 12 people killed outside the Red Cross offices.

A spokeswoman at ICRC headquarters in Geneva said the review of its presence in Iraq would focus on Baghdad, because other parts of the country were safer.

Other humanitarian agencies were also trying to balance the urge to pursue their mission against the dangers of doing so.

"Definitely some of our people will be leaving Iraq," Marc Joolens, operations coordinator for medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, told Reuters. "It's a difficult decision because there are needs, but there are also great risks."

US troops and Iraqis were still collecting body parts around the blasted Red Cross offices early yesterday, in a cratered street flooded with water from broken mains.

In the northern city of Mosul, an Iraqi newspaper editor, Ahmed Shawkat, who had written articles criticising radical Islamists, was found shot dead in his office in mid-morning, journalists said. His attacker or attackers escaped undetected.

Four US soldiers were wounded in two small-arms and grenade attacks in the Mosul area overnight, Sergeant Kelly Tyler, spokeswoman for the 101st Airborne Division, said.

In the normally peaceful south of the country controlled by British-led forces, a bomb wounded a coalition soldier, an Iraqi and a foreign national, a military spokeswoman said.

The US military has said foreign fighters might have been behind Monday's coordinated bombings, in which 230 people were wounded.

One attacker captured alive had a Syrian passport and claimed to be Syrian, military officials said. yesterday, a coalition official said investigators were now certain the man was not from Iraq but declined to elaborate.

Some reports have suggested he may have been from Yemen. Pro-Saddam Iraqi loyalists have not seemed eager to mount suicide attacks in the past. US officials say militants of al Qaeda and other Islamist groups are also operating in Iraq.

Monday's bombings, in which a US soldier died, followed the killing of three US troops on Sunday night and the death of another hours earlier when rockets hit a Baghdad hotel where US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying.

Much of the media across the Arab world blamed the United States for the surge in violence.

"Iraq, on the first day of Ramadan, was the scene of a bloodbath and occupation forces are directly responsible for this because of the instability they created in Iraq," wrote the daily al-Khaleej, published in the United Arab Emirates.

Guerrillas have killed 113 US troops since Bush declared major combat over on May 1.