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Suicide Truck Bomber Strikes Iraqi Police

A suicide truck bomber struck an Iraqi police agency in northern Iraq on Sunday, killing at least seven people and wounding 50, police said, while hundreds marched in the streets as a funeral was held for four people reportedly killed in overnight clashes in a predominantly Shiite area of eastern Baghdad.

Iraqi police in the area said fighting in the predominantly Shiite Fidhiliyah area on the Baghdad's outskirts broke out after a U.S. military convoy came under attack following a raid on the local offices of Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric whose Mahdi Army militia has recently stepped up attacks on American troops.

The U.S. military said an American patrol came under fire late Friday from small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades from the al-Sadr office and called for air and ground support. Spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said no Americans were killed or wounded, but he did not have immediate information on Iraqi casualties. "We're still looking into the incident," he said.

Associated Press Television video footage shot early Sunday showed a low-flying Apache helicopter firing flares as several hundred people, including teenagers and children, were gathered around a smoldering Humvee below.

Residents said a fire broke out in a residential house from a pile of straw used by local residents to feed animals, after U.S. helicopters dropped flares in the area.

A local resident told AP Television that U.S. troops had come on Sunday to "haul their damaged humvee out of the area."

"The damaged humvee was opposite to our house, so their aircraft shelled the house. They towed their humvee and fled," the resident said.

AP Television video footage shot on Sunday showed firemen tending to a fire at the scene.

Garver said the flares were fired automatically as part of a self-defense system for the helicopter. He said the flares, which are designed to divert heat-seeking missiles and other anti-aircraft weapons, usually burn out before they hit the ground but these were still burning because the helicopter was flying at such a low altitude.

"Those are not launched by the crew," he said. "When the helicopter receives a signal that it is being targeted by a radar, it launches those flares in self-defense against a perceived threat."

Police and witnesses said those killed and wounded in the fighting were Iraqis — they included bystanders caught in the crossfire, but did not know how many were al-Sadr loyalists.

U.S. troops stormed the al-Sadr offices and detained seven men, they said.

Sheikh Mohammed al-Hilfi, an al-Sadr representative from the office, said the clashes broke out late Friday after a raid on the office, which doubles as a mosque.

He said seven people were killed and 21 wounded, while local police officials put the casualty figure at five killed and 19 wounded. The officials said those killed were Iraqis and included bystanders caught in the crossfire, while 16 other men were detained.

Hundreds of men chanted as they carried the wooden coffins draped in Iraqi flags of four of the people reportedly killed in the melee.

Al-Hilfi accused the Americans of using the flares from the helicopters to disperse the crowd so they could recover the remains of the charred Humvee.

Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia fought U.S. forces for much of 2004. More recently, the U.S. military has repeatedly blamed the militia for the death of American soldiers in deadly roadside bombs it says are provided by Iran.

The explosion in Tikrit, which occurred about 10:30 a.m., devastated a building housing the highway police directorate in the Albu Ajil village on the eastern outskirts of ousted leader Saddam Hussein's hometown, a police officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of security concerns. Tikrit is 80 miles north of Baghdad.

The attacker detonated his payload after smashing into a blast wall, flattening a small reception building and causing heavy damage to the main two-story building just 20 yards away, the officer said, adding that most of the seven killed and 50 wounded were police.

Police and rescuers dug through the rubble in a desperate search for survivors or bodies of more victims. About 60 vehicles inside the compound also were destroyed.

"It was a huge blast, my house was damaged," said Khalaf Eidan, a 45-year-old shopkeeper who lives nearby. "I thank God that none of my children were hurt."

The blast was the deadliest of a series of attacks and other violence that killed at least 26 people, many targeting Iraqi police as militants continue to hammer the country's shaky security forces. The terror campaign against Iraqi troops and police appears designed to blunt U.S. progress in creating a stable local force so the Americans can go home.

In Other Developments:

  • An apparent suicide car bomber took aim at a U.S. convoy carrying demolition experts on Sunday, collapsing a major highway overpass south of Baghdad and trapping American soldiers in the rubble. The vehicle detonated beside a support pillar, bringing down an Army checkpoint and a tent that had been on the collapsing span, dubbed "Checkpoint 20" by the U.S. military. The overpass, one of two crossing over Iraq's main north-south highway in the region, appeared to be closed to all but military traffic at the time. A U.S. Army quick reaction force and the staff of Armor Group International, a private security firm that was in charge of the passing convoy, worked for some 45 minutes to pull trapped men from the rubble about six miles east of Mahmoudiya. There appeared to be several casualties, including an Iraqi interpreter who was wounded. The attack, which was witnessed by an Associated Press reporter and a photographer who were in the approaching convoy, occurred in the triangle of death, so called for frequent Sunni insurgent attacks. Iraqi police said the overpass was a vital link across the highway for villagers in the area because the other spans have been taken over by U.S. forces.
  • A roadside bomb struck a police patrol near a gas station in Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, killing one policeman and wounding 6 other people — five officers and one civilian — according to the provincial police center for Diyala, a hotbed of the Sunni insurgency that has become increasingly dangerous since the beginning of the Baghdad security operation nearly four months ago.
  • A suicide car bomber smashed into a police patrol about 12 miles south of the provincial capital of Baqouba, killing two policemen and wounding three others, officers at the provincial police center said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information.
  • Gunmen elsewhere in the volatile Diyala province killed two policemen and a civilian in two separate attacks in the Shiite enclave of Khalis, they said. The police chief of the Zuhra station in the Abbarah village northeast of Baqouba also was abducted after gunmen ambushed his car, police said, two days after an attack on another local police chief's house that left his wife, two brothers and 11 guards dead.
  • A suicide car bomber exploded in a line of cars waiting for gas about 11:45 a.m. in Baiyaa, an area in western Baghdad that has seen a recent rise in sectarian violence despite a U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown that began on Feb. 14. About 15 minutes later, parked car bomb also ripped through cars waiting for gas in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Sadiyah in southwestern Baghdad.
  • A roadside bomb targeted a convoy of a Kurdish brigade that had recently been deployed in western Baghdad as part of the security operation, killing one soldier and wounding three, an army officer from the brigade said on condition of anonymity. The attack occurred in Sulaiman Pak, 90 miles south of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
  • The Iraqi high tribunal said it will issue a verdict on June 24 in the trial of Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali," and four other former regime officials who face a possible death sentence if convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for their roles in a 1980s military campaign against the Kurds.
  • Protesting Turkey's shelling of northern Iraq, radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr warned Sunday that Iraqis would not remain silent in the face of Ankara's "transgressions" and called on the Turkish people to join Iraqis in rejecting such actions. In a statement issued in the holy city of Najaf south of Baghdad, the Shiite cleric said he was saddened by last week's shelling, which prompted Iraq's Foreign Ministry to summon Turkey's top diplomat in Baghdad and hand him a formal protest note Saturday. "We will not stay silent in the face of these transgressions because our faith and our nation call upon us to defend Iraq and every inch of its territory, which we consider to be holy."
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