World

Car Bomb Blasts Baghdad Bistro

January 1, 2004 / 10:01 AM EST / CBS/AP

A car bomb ripped through a crowded restaurant that was hosting a New Year's Eve party, killing five Iraqis and injuring at least 35 others, including an American and two Britons.

Rescuers pulled bleeding survivors from the building. Several cars outside the restaurant were wrecked and in flames. The blast blew up the back of the restaurant, where an American soldier leaned into the rubble after discovering an injured victim.

"She's got a pulse, she's got a pulse," he screamed.

Five people died, according to Lt. General Ahmed Kadhem, deputy Iraqi interior minister and Baghdad chief of police.

"We had information that there would be explosions today," he said, referring to threats by Iraqi insurgents who are fighting the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.

The injured included 21 Iraqis, one American and two Britons, said Dr. Mazen Jaafar, a surgeon at Ibn Nasees government hospital.

U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police had stepped up security in Baghdad on
New Year's Eve, erecting more razor wire and checkpoints in key areas. Military officials had reported the possibility of attacks by insurgents over the holiday period, similar to attacks in the capital on Christmas Day.

In other developments:

A car bomb exploded Wednesday as a U.S. convoy passed on a shop-filled street in Baghdad, destroying one Humvee, Iraqi police Sgt. Thabet Talib said. An 8-year-old Iraqi boy was killed and 21 other people were wounded, including five U.S. soldiers and five Iraqi civil defense personnel, authorities said.

Near the southern city of Basra, a South Korean was killed in an ambush and resulting gunbattle between Romanian soldiers and Iraqi insurgents, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported Wednesday. There was no immediate confirmation of the report or whether the victim was a soldier or a civilian.

Gunfire erupted as hundreds of Arab and Turkmens marched in protest over fears of Kurdish domination in the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, and police said two people were killed.

U.S. military officials reported a U.S. soldier was killed and a second wounded in the accidental discharge of a weapon. A statement said the accident, in the 82nd Airborne Division, occurred Tuesday evening at Tanf, on Iraq's western border with Syria. It was the 478th U.S. death in Iraq.

Just weeks after Pentagon auditors said Halliburton may have overcharged taxpayers $61 million to import oil to Iraq, the Defense Department is removing the Army Corps of Engineers from its role in supervising the program.

For U.S. intelligence and allies, the weapons hunt in Iraq may have far reaching consequences in the coming year for the United States in its efforts to curb Iran, North Korea, Syria and others. In nine months, not a single item has been found in Iraq from a long and classified intelligence list of weapons of mass destruction which guided the work of dozens of elite teams from Special Forces, the military, the CIA and the Pentagon.

Iraqi state television took graphic footage of badly injured prisoners of war Jessica Lynch and Lori Piestewa, who may have died shortly afterward, following the ambush of the soldiers' convoy, NBC reported. The tape was never aired in Iraq.

Police Brig. Hamid Alyasiry, who is in charge of Karrada, an upscale shopping and restaurant district where the blast occurred, confirmed that it was a car bomb. He said there were two foreign journalists in the restaurant, but did not identify them.

"The people who are carrying out such attacks do not discriminate about the place," Alyasiry said. "They want to frighten everyone to create terror."

Sirens wailing, ambulances converged on the area near the former U.S. Embassy. The restaurant is called Nabil, and had advertised a New Year's Eve party, including live music and bellydancing. The posh restaurant is popular with foreigners.

"There was an explosion. The glass came flying. Everything else blew up. People were blown apart," said Basam Sarhan, a 25-year-old baker who was working in the kitchen at the back of the restaurant when the explosion hit.

Gunfire was heard immediately after the explosion as U.S. soldiers headed to the site of the blast, and U.S. military helicopters hovered overhead. Firefighters trained hoses on the flames. A large crater was visible on a sidestreet next to the restaurant, which is on the corner of a city block.

"It was a car bomb. It went off in front of us. It was very powerful," a young boy told Associated Press Television News. He did not give his name.

Blood streaming down his face, an angry man named Khalil said: "Why did they have to do it to us?"

One witness, Ahmed Hassanain, said a white Toyota Corolla car drove by the area five or six times before the bombing. The last time it passed, he said, the guard at the restaurant shot at it. It drove away. Two minutes later, there was an explosion. He said he didn't know if it was the Corolla that blew up.

"These people are terrorists," Hassanain said. "Nobody here supports them."

Nabil Hanna, owner of the restaurant, said he was not in the restaurant at the time of the blast but that he had heard it was crowded with people, including many foreigners who were attending the New Year's party.

Hanna said 50 people had booked for the party, including about a dozen foreigners. Sarhan, the baker, said there were about 25 people in the restaurant, including three or four foreigners.

Outside the restaurant, a young man and a woman with blood on her face and shoulders clutched each other, crying. She said they were a family of six having New Year's dinner in the building next to the restaurant when the blast ripped away the side wall of their building. She said her uncle was taken to a hospital for treatment.

Inside the restaurant, big round tables set for dinner were covered with food. One table held a bottle of White Horse scotch, still standing but with the neck blown off.

Later in the evening, a bomb hidden in shrubs outside another restaurant in Baghdad exploded as a U.S. military convoy passed, wounding three American soldiers and three Iraqi civilians.

In Kirkuk, it was not immediately clear who fired the shots into hundreds of Arabs and Turkmen demanding that the city remain under a central Iraqi government and not be incorporated into any proposed Kurdish area.

"Kirkuk is an Iraqi city!" protesters shouted.

Police Col. Salem Taha said Kurdish gunmen opened fire as demonstrators opposed to Kirkuk joining a Kurdish federation tried to converge on the office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party.

But a party official, Jalal Jawher, said armed men who had infiltrated the protest fired at his party office and police guarding the building returned fire.

"We did not open fire on the protesters. Not a single shot was fired from our building," Jawher said. The official said his party was not opposed to the demonstration.

Two protesters were killed and 16 were wounded in the shooting, said Taha, the police colonel. Records at Jumhouri Hospital showed 26 wounded people were admitted Wednesday.

U.S. soldiers moved in with tanks to barricade the area and set up checkpoints at major intersections.

Residents of Kirkuk are divided in roughly equal parts among three ethnic groups — Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds.

Some Kurds in Kirkuk have been calling for the city to become part of an autonomous Kurdistan, joining a Switzerland-sized area of northern Iraq where Kurds have ruled themselves since the end of the 1991 Gulf War under U.S.-led aerial protection.

Under the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Sunni Arab minority dominated the country. The Shiite majority is largely centered in the south, while Kurds dominate the north.

The Governing Council, selected by U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer to reflect the size of the country's diverse groups, has 13 Shiites, five Arab Sunnis, five Kurdish Sunnis, one Turkman and one Christian.

The U.S.-led coalition plans to transfer authority to a transitional Iraqi government by July 1.