Suicide bomb brings carnage to Iraq street

Iraqis were opening their shops, walking to their offices and queuing up to try to find casual work in a Baghdad street yesterday when a suicide car bomber blew an ordinary morning apart, killing at least 13 people.

It was the second such bombing in the Iraqi capital in 24 hours and coincided with a wave of assassinations aimed at the new interim government appointed to take over from the US-British occupation authorities on June 30.

The morning rush-hour attack devastated a busy street near Tahrir Square and ripped the front off one building. Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said the blast had killed five foreign contractors in a passing convoy.

"I walked past the convoy on my way to work. Then this blast hit behind me, throwing me to the ground," said Abdel Zahra Rahim Lutfi, lying injured at Al-Kindi Hospital.

"That area is so busy in the morning. Lots of people were hurt."

Hospitals said eight other people, including two African workers, were also killed. About 60 were wounded. Many had limbs torn off by the blast.

The impact of the blast shattered windows down filthy side alleys, lined with workshops and lodgings for labourers who gather in the area looking for casual work.

The facade of a three-storey brick building that served as a hostel collapsed, crushing some inside. The stairwells, beds and other furniture could be seen from the street.

Smoke was still rising from the burned-out shells of three civilian cars blown inside the ground floor of the hostel by the force of the blast. At least four other cars lay battered on the thoroughfare, which Iraqi police closed off to traffic.

Locals and firefighters doused the blaze and sifted through the rubble, lifting casualties into waiting ambulances.

"There were three of these four-wheel drives on the road when a car came out from near that hostel, overtook them and exploded, sending one flying off the road and into flames," said passer-by Ali Rasoul Shammali. "There were a lot of ordinary cars parked on this street, a lot of people just going to work."

The force of the blast blew one of the four-wheel drive vehicles in the convoy off the street into an adjacent park, where the blackened wreck smouldered in the morning sunshine. Witnesses said they saw at least two charred bodies inside.

Amid the shattered glass inside one of the other four-wheel drives was a packet of American cigarettes and a silver coffee mug. In the back of the other, whose tinted windows were still intact, were piles of documents and files.

As U.S. forces began arriving at the scene, Iraqi youths poured out from nearby alleys, some to hurl stones at them.

Dozens of people gathered around two of the vehicles targeted in the blast, jumping up and down on their roofs, hammering them with bits of debris and chanting: "There is no God but Allah. America is the enemy of Allah."

The cheering crowd set the vehicles on fire, sending thick black smoke into the sky as U.S. forces looked on.