A suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives killed 32 people when he blew himself up among mourners at a Shiite funeral north of Baghdad on Monday, Iraqi police said. The attack took place inside a crowded mourning tent in the town of Khalis in Diyala province, police said. More than 52 people had been wounded, they said.Since US and Iraqi forces launched a security crackdown in Baghdad in February, militants including Al-Qaeda have increasingly focused their attacks outside the capital. Diyala, a religiously mixed area, has been the scene of fierce fighting between US troops and Al-Qaeda as well as Sunni Arab insurgents. Residents said the funeral had been for the son of a Shiite family. The son had been killed by gunmen, they said.
| In Anbar province, a tanker laden with chlorine gas exploded near a restaurant west of the city of Ramadi, killing six people and wounding 10, police and hospital sources said. |
Separately, at least eight bullet-riddled bodies, many bearing signs of torture, also were found in different cities. British Defense Secretary Des Browne made an unannounced visit to Baghdad on Monday and met his Iraqi counterpart, the British embassy said. Browne and his Iraqi counterpart, Abdel-Qader Jassem Mohammad, talked about the ongoing security crackdown in Baghdad and recent progress made in the war against Al-Qaeda in Anbar, the Iraqi Defense Ministry said.
Meanwhile, the first convicted war criminal in British history was fired from the army and sentenced to one year in jail on Monday after pleading guilty to abusing prisoners in Iraq. Corporal Donald Payne admitted abusing detainees in the case of Bahaa Moussa, an Iraqi hotel receptionist who died after receiving 93 separate injuries from repeated beatings in British custody in 2003.
In other developments, five US soldiers were killed in Iraq over the weekend, raising the number of American troops killed this month to over 100 and making April one of the deadliest of the war for US forces. The toll could increase the pressure on US President George W. Bush, who is fighting a plan by Democrats to set a timetable for withdrawing US forces from Iraq.
The US military said three soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter were killed by a roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad on Sunday. A Marine was killed in western Anbar province on Sunday. Another soldier was killed by small arms fire in eastern Baghdad on Saturday, the military said.
Elsewhere, US forces killed eight gunmen in Baghdad on Sunday, in what some witnesses described Monday as a clash with the Mehdi Army militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The US military said one Iraqi soldier was killed in the overnight raid in which US and Iraqi forces intended to capture "high-value individuals" meeting in the Shiite Kadhemiyya district, the US military said in a statement. It denied reports that US forces had entered a mosque and an office run by Sadr, but gave no affiliation for the gunmen.
A US military spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver, said US forces had set up an outer perimeter during the incident, while Iraqi forces carried out the operation. "The fight was between extremists and Coalition forces in the outer perimeter. Coalition forces came under fire and responded, and killed eight extremists," he said.
Thousands of followers of Sadr took to the streets in Baghdad on Monday in protest at the US operation. Sadr urged Iraqis on Monday to paint the concrete barriers springing up around Baghdad with murals showing what he dubbed the "ugly face" of the US military in Iraq.
American and Iraqi forces are gradually building a series of walls around or between some Baghdad neighborhoods, in what their commanders call a "concrete caterpillar" designed to protect residents from sectarian violence. But many Iraqis argue that the barricades will only heighten tension between Sunnis and Shiites by segregating the once mixed city.
Baghdad council has employed professional artists to paint the walls with calming landscapes and scenes depicting Iraq's natural beauty, but Sadr has something more dramatic in mind. "I call on you to draw magnificent tableaux that depict the ugliness and terrorist nature of the occupier, and the sedition, car bombings, blood and the like he has brought upon Iraqis," he said, in a statement issued by his office.