At Least 40 Killed At U.S.-Iraqi Base

Also, Gunmen Kidnapped 16 Employees Of Iraqi Trading Company

(CBS/AP)  A suicide bomber attacked a joint U.S.-Iraqi military base in northern Iraq in Monday, killing at least 40 people and wounding as many as 30, the Iraqi defense ministry said.

Also Monday, gunmen kidnapped 16 employees of an Iraqi trading company, an Interior Ministry official said Monday. The men arrived at the headquarters of the Saeed import and export company in four civilian cars and appeared to rifle through papers and computers before driving away with the employees.

No American troops were hurt in the bombing about 18 miles east of the ancient city of Tal Afar, said the U.S. military, which confirmed the attack but reported 30 deaths rather than 40.

The bomber struck shortly after noon at the station, killing both civilians and military personnel gathered among "a crowd of recruits who were attempting to join the Iraqi Army," the defense ministry said in a statement. Iraqi police and army recruits are constantly targeted, CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports.

President Bush singled out Tal Afar in a recent speech as a success story for American and Iraqi forces in the drive to quell the insurgency.

U.S. soldiers helped secure the area after the attack and treat the wounded, the U.S. military said.

Iraqi army Lt. Akram Eid told The Associated Press that many of the injured were taken to the Sykes U.S. Army base on the outskirts of Tal Afar, which is about 40 miles west of Mosul, Iraq's third largest city.

In other recent developments:

At least 21 more corpses were found Monday, many with nooses around their neck. Nine were found in west Baghdad, handcuffed, blindfolded and with ropes around their necks, police Lt. Akeel Fadhil said. Militias are blamed for many of these killings, Logan reports.

Mortar and bomb attacks killed at least four Monday. In the capital, a bomb exploded in a bus headed for the Sadr City slum of east Baghdad, killing two passengers and wounding at least four others, police Col. Hassan Jaloob said. The bomb had been left in a bag, he said. A car bomb at the entrance to Sadr City also exploded, though reports on casualties were not immediately available.

Saddam Hussein's chief deputy, who has eluded capture since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq three years ago, purportedly called for Arab leaders to back Iraq's Sunni-backed insurgency, in an audiotape broadcast Monday. The tape, which Al-Jazeera television said was made by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, appeared to be an address to the Arab League summit in Khartoum, Sudan, this week. The voice on the tape said Iraq's Sunni-led insurgency was "the sole legitimate representative of the Iraqi people." It was impossible to determine the tape's authenticity.

A total of at least 69 people were reported killed Sunday in one of the bloodiest days in weeks. Most of the dead appeared to be victims the shadowy Sunni-Sectarian score-settling that has torn at the fabric of Iraq since Feb. 22 when a Shiite shrine was blown apart in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Iraqi authorities reported late Sunday that U.S. forces raided an Interior Ministry building and arrested 40 policemen after discovering 17 non-Iraqi prisoners in the facility. Police 1st Lt. Thayer Mahmoud said the arrested police were being held for investigation, but the reason was not known.

The Bush administration will ask Russia about a Pentagon report that Moscow turned over information on American troop movements and other military plans to Saddam Hussein during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday. "Any implication that there were those from a foreign government who may have been passing information to the Iraqis prior to the invasion would be, of course, very worrying," Rice said. Moscow denied the report's findings.

Meanwhile, a murky picture continues to emerge about violence before sundown Sunday in Iraq, with Iraqis claiming U.S. forces entered a mosque and opened fire, killing at least 20 people on the outskirts of the Shiite slum of Sadr City, reports CBS News.

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©MMVI CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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