Suicide bomb kills 20 in Baghdad
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-07-02 16:23

BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber killed up to 20 people and wounded at least 21 at a police recruitment center in Baghdad on Saturday, while across town an angry crowd of Shi'ites buried a senior cleric gunned down by insurgents.

The bombing was the worst in Iraq in at least six days after a relative lull in the Sunni Arab insurgency against U.S. forces and the Shi'ite- and Kurdish-led government in Baghdad.

A senior Interior Ministry source said 20 people had been killed and the death toll could rise.

Twelve bodies lay under sheets surrounded by wailing relatives in a courtyard at the nearby Yarmuk hospital.

Doctors there said they were also treating 21 wounded, many of them in serious condition. Others may have been treated elsewhere and some bodies may have been collected by families at the scene.

The Interior Ministry source said the bomber wore an explosive vest beneath civilian clothes when he approached the Interior Ministry's special forces recruitment center in the Mansour district of western Baghdad.

The same recruitment center, near the Green Zone government and diplomatic compound, has been targeted by bombers several times in the past. An Interior Ministry source said recruits had been told to come on Saturday, normally a non-working day, in an effort to fox the insurgents and protect the volunteers.

"Apparently the precaution did not work," he said.

Suicide bombings and car bombs have become the deadliest tactic in violence which has worsened sharply since the elected government took office in April.

Police recruits are frequent targets, yet many Iraqi men continue to sign up in the hope of a paying job in a country where work is scarce.

CLERIC MOURNED

In a Shi'ite Muslim neighborhood across town, thousands of men held aloft the green-shrouded coffin of cleric Kamal al-Din al-Ghoureify, gunned down near his mosque as he drove to prayers on Friday.

Ghoureify was a Baghdad representative for Ayatollah Ali al -Sistani, recognized as spiritual leader by much of Iraq's Shi'ite majority. Mourners packed the streets chanting and beating their chests, some brandishing AK-47 rifles, others holding portraits of the slain, turbaned cleric.

"It is a calamity for the neighborhood, for Baghdad, for Muslims and for Shi'ites," Ghoureify's weeping brother Abu Hussein told Reuters. "What was his guilt? He was an old man, 70 years old and paralyzed. What did he do?"

Ghoureify's murder was one of three attacks on prominent Shi'ite targets within 24 hours.

A suicide car bomber killed a bystander on Friday at a house in Baghdad used as an office by Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, also a Shi'ite. The previous night an uncle and a cousin of Shi'ite national security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie were shot dead in their shop in Baghdad with four others.

U.S. Marines said they were checking to see whether they had killed a cousin of Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations in a raid last week.

Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie said Marines killed his first cousin's son, Mohammed al-Sumaidaie, an engineering student, during a June 25 raid on his home in Al-Shaikh Hadid, near a U.S. military base at Haditha Dam.

"All indications point to a killing of an unarmed innocent civilian -- a cold-blooded murder," said Sumaidaie, a Sunni Arab and ally of the United States, on Friday. "The Marines were smiling at each other as they were leaving."

The Marines said in a statement: "The events described in the allegations roughly correspond to an incident involving Coalition Forces on that day in that general location; therefore a military inquiry has been initiated to review the circumstances and the facts surrounding the incident."