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Iraq suicide bomber kills 60 in market { February 2 2007 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/world/middleeast/02iraq.html?ref=middleeasthttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/world/middleeast/02iraq.html?ref=middleeast
February 2, 2007
Iraq Suicide Bombers Kill 60 and Wound 150 in Market in Southern City
By JAMES GLANZ
BAGHDAD, Feb. 1 — Twin suicide bombers struck a market jammed with people in the southern Iraqi town of Hilla on Thursday, killing at least 60, wounding 150 and spraying body parts so far that the police were still scouring rooftops for them late in the night.
Residents there were catching up on their shopping after the Shiite holiday of Ashura. A student at a local high school, Ali Mohammad, said he and two friends had just left the school gym and were about to make some purchases when the first bomb went off at a checkpoint on the edge of the market. The leader of a local commando unit said the bomber set off a suicide vest when a policeman at the checkpoint discovered it during a search.
Seconds later, a second bomb went off. “I was hit in the leg, a small wound,” Mr. Mohammad said. “I was so scared, I didn’t help my friends. I just left them in the area and went home.”
Later he found them both in a local hospital, one dead, one with a leg blown off. The commando leader said the hospital was so overwhelmed with casualties that it was forced to turn some people away after dispensing whatever medicine was available.
The explosions were the latest incidents in a wash of violence that has swept over a belt of Shiite-controlled Iraq starting about 30 miles south of Baghdad and stretching about 70 miles farther south. Besides Hilla, the regional capital, the belt contains the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.
The reasons for the violence are unclear, although American and Iraqi officials cite increasing rivalries between armed Shiite groups, possible meddling by neighboring countries like Iran, and sectarian hatreds between Sunni and Shiite Arabs. A mixture of the two groups populates the northern part of the belt, while the southern part is overwhelmingly Shiite.
In Baghdad, which sometimes resembles a deadly dartboard where citizens can die at any time, relentless shelling, bombing and other violence killed at least 46 people. Mortar shells rained down in the Adhamiya, Qahira and Khadamiya neighborhoods, killing at least five and wounding 33, an Interior Ministry official said.
Elsewhere in the city, a suicide bomber detonated the minibus he was driving near St. Raphael Hospital in the Karada neighborhood, killing 6 and wounding 12. A parked car blew up in Rusafa Square in central Baghdad, killing three and wounding nine. The official said 30 bodies of unidentified people had been found dumped around Baghdad on Thursday, apparently the victims of death squads.
Outside Baghdad, two carloads of gunmen stormed a college at Diyala University and killed the dean and his son before driving off. And a car bomb attack on an Iraqi police and Army convoy in Qaim, a town on the Syrian border in the desert province of Anbar, killed three and wounded six.
The American military said a soldier died Thursday “from wounds due to enemy action” in Anbar. Following standard procedure, the military gave no details.
The double bombing in Hilla took place only a few hundred yards from the spot where in February 2005 a car bomb killed at least 125 people in the third-deadliest atrocity since the American-led invasion in 2003, according to tabulations kept by The Associated Press.
Suspicion later fell on a young Jordanian man who had apparently been recruited by Al Qaeda as a suicide bomber, but the connection was never proved.
Last summer, a bomb struck the same market, killing at least half a dozen people. Near the Hilla River and called the maktabat or bookstores market, the place now sells everything from vegetables to school supplies, with vendors spreading their wares on carpets and small tables in an elongated area that runs north to south.
Because of the earlier bombings, tall concrete blast walls now surround the market, gates prevent cars from entering and policemen frisk shoppers at checkpoints before they are allowed in. It was at one of those checkpoints that the first bomb exploded about 6 p.m., said Mr. Mohammad, the local student.
As people in the market frantically tried to leave — greatly constrained by the blast walls and checkpoints — the second bomber was waiting where people were funneled through one of the main gates, Mr. Mohammad said.
Qais Mizher contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Karbala and Ramadi.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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