55 Killed In Iraq Violence
55 killed in Iraq violence
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...677843,00.html
(Gold9472: It's a DAMN shame!)
James Sturcke and agencies
Wednesday January 4, 2006
At least 55 people were killed across Iraq today in the worst day of violence since last month's elections.
In the most serious incident, 36 people died when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives in the middle of a funeral procession, police and hospital officials said.
More than 100 mourners were standing in a cemetery for the burial of a nephew of the director of the Muqdadiyah hospital when the explosion happened, leaving tombstones stained with blood and body parts on the ground, police said.
At least 42 people were injured in the blast, official Firas al-Nida at the hospital in Muqdadiya, a town around 60 miles north of Baghdad, said.
The director of the hospital, Ahmed al-Bakka, was badly wounded in an assassination attempt yesterday, and his nephew and a bodyguard were killed.
Mr al-Bakka is also the head of the local Dawa party, a junior partner in the country's largest Shia political coalition.
Elsewhere, a car bomb exploded near an outdoor market in Baghdad's southern Dora district, killing seven people and wounding 15, police said. The bomb, which damaged several shops and nearby vehicles, targeted a police patrol near the market at the time, said police spokesman Firras Giti.
In other incidents in the capital, three civilians and a policeman were killed by a car bomb in northern Baghdad. Another 13 people were wounded. Meanwhile, gunmen killed a former army captain and fired on the car of an oil ministry employee, killing the man and his son.
To the north of Baghdad, gunmen ambushed a convoy of 60 fuel tankers, destroying or damaging 20 of them, police and oil officials said. In Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, a roadside bomb targeting a US patrol instead hit a civilian car, killing three passengers.
In Mosul, 225 miles north-west of Baghdad, militants attacked the political offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, killing a civilian who was caught in the crossfire. A roadside bomb in Baquba killed a woman.
Earlier today, dozens of people gathered around the rubble of a building in Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, which was bombed by US aircraft late last night. Seven people died and four were injured.
The US military said an unmanned aircraft had detected three men planting a roadside bomb in the city and that Navy F-14s had bombed a nearby building the men had entered.
Despite the violence, the three major political parties were close to forming a coalition government that would include Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds, a Shia politician said.
"We can say that the [three parties] are close to forming a new government," Ridha Jawad Taqi, a member of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a coalition partner in the United Iraqi Alliance, said.
An international monitoring team this week began to review results from last month's parliamentary elections, including some of the hundreds of complaints filed.
A member of Iraq's election commission said final results would not be announced until the international review was completed, possibly in mid-January.
