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Bombers kill 74 at two mosques in Iraq
(AP)
Updated: 2005-11-19 01:04
Suicide bombers killed 74 worshippers at two Shiite mosques near the Iranian
border Friday, while a pair of car bombs targeting a Baghdad hotel housing
Western journalists killed eight Iraqis.
A wounded Iraqi walks on debris after two car bombs exploded
near a Baghdad hotel. At least 67 worshippers were killed in suicide
attacks on two Shiite mosques in eastern Iraq near the border with Iran,
hours after suicide bombers killed six people outside a Baghdad hotel.
[AP] |
The suicide attackers targeted the Sheik Murad mosque and the Khanaqin Grand
Mosque in Khanaqin, 90 miles northeast of Baghdad, as dozens of people were
attending Friday prayers, police said. The police command said 74 people were
killed and 75 wounded in the largely Kurdish town.
At sunset, dozens of people were still searching the rubble of the
three-story Khanaqin Grand Mosque. As the men dug, 12-year-old Sarkhel Akram
collected copies of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, then she kissed them and
put them away.
The suicide attacker walked into the mosque and detonated his explosives in
the middle of a group of people, said Ali Abdullah.
Omar Saleh, 73, said from his bed at Kalar hospital that he was bowing in
prayer when the bomb exploded.
"The roof fell on us and the place was filled with dead bodies," he said.
The blasts near the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad knocked down protective concrete
walls and blew out windows but caused no structural damage. Several nearby homes
were destroyed, and firefighters and U.S. troops joined neighbors to dig through
the debris to pull out victims.
Gunfire followed the blasts, which came less than a minute apart and echoed
throughout downtown Baghdad. They sent a mushroom cloud hundreds of feet into
the air.
"What we have here appears to be two suicide car bombs (that) attempted to
breach the security wall in the vicinity of the hotel complex, and I think the
target was the Hamra Hotel," U.S. Brig. Gen. Karl Horst told reporters at the
scene.
News organizations housed at the Hamra include NBC News and The Boston Globe.
The attack was the first against a hotel housing international journalists
since the Oct. 24 triple vehicle bomb attack against the Palestine Hotel, where
The Associated Press, Fox News and other organizations live and work.
In that attack, which killed 17 Iraqis, one of vehicles blew a hole in a
concrete wall, opening the way for a cement truck packed with explosives to
penetrate the compound. The truck detonated only a few feet into the compound
after U.S. troops raked the vehicle with small arms fire and the driver got
stuck in debris. A third vehicle went off a short distance away, perhaps as a
diversion.
Mike Boettcher of NBC News, who was in the Hamra when Friday's bomb exploded,
said on the "Today" show that a white van drove up to the blast walls that
protect the hotel, detonated at 8:12 a.m., and "we were blown out of our beds."
He said that according to the U.S. Army, that bomb was meant to open the way
for a second, bigger truck to drive in with even more explosives.
"Instead, the gap he made on the first bomb was too small, and it exploded
outside the wall and it caused great destruction in the neighborhood right
outside our wall," Boettcher said.
He said his staff had been trained to stay down after an initial blast in
case there was a second bomb — and that turned out to be the case.
"We got down on the floor and crawled, and then the second bomb hit, and we
were blown back," Boettcher said.
"To be in the middle of this — not a pleasant experience, but I feel a lot
more sorry for those people who were killed just outside our compound, who
didn't have that blast wall to protect them. That saved our lives," he said.
Sa'ad al-Izzi, an Iraqi journalist with the Globe, also was inside the hotel.
"They were trying to penetrate by displacing the blast barriers behind the
hotel and then get to the hotel," he said. "I woke up to a huge explosion which
broke all the glass and displaced all the window and doors frames."
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