Bomb attacks on north Iraq police kill 29 people

A spate of bomb attacks against police in Iraq’s disputed oil-rich city of Kirkuk yesterday killed at least 29 people, the worst violence to hit the country in nearly two months.

A further 90 people were wounded in the three attacks, which drew condemnation from the UN’s envoy to Iraq, with just months to go before US forces must withdraw from the country.

And in separate bombings in Baghdad and the central city of Baquba, a woman and an imam were killed and 10 others wounded, security officials said.

Two car bombs and a magnetic “sticky bomb” attached to a car exploded in the ethnically mixed northern city of Kirkuk, security officials said.

The first blast took place at 9.20 a.m. when the sticky bomb exploded in the parking lot of the city’s police headquarters, Major Salam Zangan said.

When police and emergency responders arrived at the scene shortly afterwards, a car bomb detonated.

“I ran out from the headquarters after I heard the first bomb; I went with my colleague to check the parking lot but as we arrived, a huge bomb went off,” said Sherzad Kamil, a policeman who was wounded in the abdomen and face.

“I fell on the ground and saw several of my colleagues killed and wounded,” he said, speaking from Kirkuk general hospital, adding he saw colleagues whose bodies caught fire in the second blast.

Kirkuk provincial health director Sadiq Omar Rasul said 29 people were killed and 90 others wounded in the three explosions. He said 26 of the dead were police, as were the vast majority of the injured.

An interior ministry official in Baghdad said 29 people had died and 80 others were wounded, while a senior security official in Kirkuk said 27 were killed.

The first two explosions caused massive damage to nearby police and civilian vehicles.

Afterwards, several police cars with loudspeakers affixed to them could be heard appealing to people to make their way to the city’s hospital to donate much-needed blood for victims, an AFP journalist said.

At around 10.30 a.m., another car bomb detonated near the convoy of a senior police official in Kirkuk, Colonel Aras Mohammed.