Suicide Bomber Kills 35 In Baghdad
A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a police recruiting center in Baghdad early Sunday, killing at least 35 people and wounding 56, police said.
Crowds of recruits had been gathering outside the center in western Baghdad's Nissur Square when the bomber detonated explosives strapped to his body at exactly 10:00 a.m., police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razaq said.
Abdul-Razaq said the death toll was expected to rise because many of the injuries were extremely serious.
The attack was one of several Sunday in the capital, where sectarian violence kills scores each week. Just south of the city, police were searching for gunmen who killed 10 Shiite travelers and kidnapped about 50 others Saturday night along a notoriously dangerous stretch of highway.
Earlier Sunday, a pair of roadside bombings targeting police patrols in Baghdad killed at least six passers-by and wounded six others, said police Cap. Mohammed Abdul-Ghani.
A car bomb outside a market in Baghdad's primarily Shiite downtown Karradah killed at least one person and wounded five others, while a similar bomb killed two people and injured 13 in the mainly Sunni neighborhood of Radhwaniyah, Police 1st. Lt. Thaer Mahoud said.
Unknown gunmen also shot to death police Brig. Abdul-Mutalib Hassan as he was leaving his Karradah home for work. Hassan had been head of a police unit in charge of registering vehicles that is widely seen as a source of corruption.
Five people were killed in drive by shooting in different parts of Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. The victims included a teacher, taxi driver, laborer, truck driver and phone company worker, provincial police said.
Patrols were looking for the Sunni gunmen who ambushed a convoy of minibuses at a fake checkpoint on the dangerous highway near the volatile town of Latifiyah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad in the so-called Triangle of Death.
The gunmen murdered 10 Shiite passengers before taking their captives to an unknown location, said the spokesman, who asked that his name not be used because he wasn't authorized to speak to media.
A leading Shiite politician warned that local tribes had armed themselves and were headed to the area to join in the search, a move likely to set off even greater bloodshed.
In an address to parliament, Abdul-Karim al-Anzi said the kidnappers had worn Iraqi army uniforms. He complained that security forces were doing little to capture the hostages.
"We demand that the government take quick action to send troops there in order to know the fate of those kidnapped," al-Anzi said.
Along with those killed, five bodies — all blindfolded and bound at the wrists and ankles — had also been recovered in various parts of eastern Baghdad early Sunday, police said. All had been mutilated by torture, marking them as victims of death squads that regularly kidnap rivals from Iraq's Muslim Sunni and Shiite sects.
Three more bodies were pulled from the Tigris River in Suwayrah, 25 miles south of Baghdad, morgue official Maamoun al-Ajili said.
Five people were also killed in a series of apparently unrelated drive-by shootings in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. Those killed included a teacher, communication employee, taxi driver, laborer and truck driver in Khalis 50 miles north of Baghdad, provincial police said.
U.S. forces, meanwhile, said they detained 10 people suspected of having links to al Qaeda in a raid in Baghdad early Saturday. The military said no one was killed or wounded in the raid, and said those detained "associated with terrorists who are involved in the housing, movement and enabling of foreign fighters, to include the organization of suicide operations within Baghdad."
U.S. forces aircraft also destroyed a building in the western city of Ramadi that had been boobytrapped with explosives, the military said.
In other developments:
The spiraling violence coincides with increasingly strident demands from the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for American forces to pull back into bases and leave Iraq's cities and towns under the control of his military and police forces. But the highly partisan troops and police are believed to be involved in sectarian killings themselves or to look the other way, allowing Shiite death squads and militias to operate unmolested.
In the capital, the United States military offered a $50,000 reward for an Iraqi-American soldier kidnapped nearly three weeks ago.
Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie, a 41-year-old translator from Ann Arbor, Michigan, was handcuffed and driven away by gunmen of a rogue Shiite militia while visiting his Iraqi wife and her family on Oct. 23.
Al-Taayie's uncle last week said he had received through an intermediary a demand for $250,000 from the kidnappers, but there was no word on further communications.
There were no reported deaths among America's 152,000 service men and women in Iraq on Saturday. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq, oversaw a Veterans Day ceremony at which 75 members of the armed forces from 33 countries were sworn in as American citizens, CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports.
In Baghdad, eight people died and at least 38 were wounded when two bombs hidden under parked cars exploded among noontime shoppers in downtown Baghdad's Hafidh al-Qadhi square. Police and a medical worker said at least 38 others were injured in the explosion at the formerly bustling area on the eastern bank of the Tigris River.
Baghdad police 1st Lt. Thayer Mahmud said his men found 25 corpses dumped in several parts of the capital in the 24 hours from 6 p.m. Friday.
A Samarra police captain, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said the city morgue had received the beheaded bodies of five soldiers who were kidnapped last week in the Meshahda area, 20 miles north of the capital.