The Hindu : Front Page : 68 killed in Basra serial blasts

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Apr 22, 2004

Front Page

Front Page

68 killed in Basra serial blasts

By Atul Aneja

MANAMA, APRIL 21. At least 68 persons were killed and 100 injured in a series of explosions that rocked three police stations and a police academy in the southern Iraqi city of Basra this morning.

One blast ripped through two passing school buses, killing 18 children, including kindergarteners and middle-school girls.

Three near-simultaneous explosions targeted the police stations. Soon a fourth went off at the police academy in Basra's Zubair suburb. An hour later, a fifth explosion rocked the same academy.

Fortyfive persons died in the police station blasts and 10 were killed in the police academy detonations. Four British soldiers at the academy were also injured, two of them seriously, British officials said.

Outside one of the police stations in Basra's Saudia district, four vehicles, including the two school vans were gutted. Dead children, burnt beyond recognition, were taken to mortuaries as a light haze caused by the rising smoke from the burnt vehicles engulfed the area. The powerful blast created a crater two metres deep and three metres wide. Angry crowds stoned British troops heading towards the site of the carnage. The British military spokesman, Squadron Leader Jonathan Arnold, said car bombs might have caused the blasts.

The Interior Minister in the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, Samir Shaker Mahmoud al-Sumeidi, blamed "terrorists" for the attacks.

Violence, after three days of calm, also surfaced in the Sunni resistance hub of Fallujah. Today, about 35 Iraqis attacked U.S. troops in the embattled city, using small arms and rocket propelled grenades.

The fighting, which began at 6 a.m. local time, continued for four hours, as U.S. planes flew overhead. Witnesses said six civilians were killed and 10 wounded in the U.S. firing. The fighting broke out within hours of the statement by the U.S. Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, that truce in the town, forged after three days of dialogue, could not hold indefinitely as Iraqi resistance fighters were not directly involved in the negotiations.

The U.S. toll in April had climbed to 100, with one American soldier dying in an ambush in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Tuesday.

Today's serial bombings in Basra come a day after a tribunal of judges and prosecutors to try the former Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, was named. In a controversial move, Salem Chalabi, a nephew of Ahmed Chalabi, an arch-foe of Mr. Hussein, was named director. He will appoint a panel of seven judges and four prosecutors.

Iraqi resistance fighters have targeted police stations in the past, but this is the first time they have struck in Shia-dominated Basra.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Front Page

News Update

Stories in this Section

NDTV poll finds Naidu in trouble, Krishna and Patnaik poised to return

68 killed in Basra serial blasts

One killed in police firing

Won't quit midway: PM

10 killed in explosion

CJI summons 3 judges

Along the Golden Quadrilateral, it's Vajpayee all the way