Blasts mar first Assembly meeting in Iraq
Pakistan Times Monitoring Report

BAGHDAD (Iraq): Iraq’s first freely elected parliament in half a century began its opening session Wednesday after a series of explosions targeted the gathering.

The opening marked a major milestone on the road to forming a new government in a country still beset by violence.

The parliament’s 275 members, elected in Jan. 30 elections, gathered in an auditorium amid tight security in the heavily guarded Green Zone with U.S. helicopter gunships hovering overhead.

11 Killed in Violence

Meanwhile, eleven people were killed Wednesday in car bombs and other attacks across Iraq.

In the rebel bastion of Baquba, a suicide car bomb blew up at an Iraqi national guard checkpoint, killing five soldiers and wounding 10 troops, plus two civilians, police said.

“Five Iraqi soldiers were killed and 10 others were wounded, as well as two civilians, in a suicide car bombing at an Iraqi army checkpoint five kilometres northwest of Baquba,” a police spokesman said.

Earlier, hospital officials in Baquba said two people had died in the blast. One of the wounded, Abdel Karim Jassem, said from his hospital bed that he heard a loud explosion just after 9:00 am [0600 GMT].

“I was in a car behind four vehicles that were headed towards the checkpoint when the explosion occurred,” he said. Doctors said his life was not in danger.
The explosion happened in the northeastern Mafraq district, where attacks on the police and army are common.

Car Bomb Targets Convey

Meanwhile, a car bomb targeting a US military convoy blew up in the southern Baghdad district of Dura, killing one civilian and wounding a dozen others, security sources said.

A Katyusha rocket struck a two-floor house in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Karrada at 1:30 pm (1030 GMT), setting the building on fire and destroying two cars, but there were no casualties, a police captain said.

A roadside bomb in the refinery town of Baiji, 200 kilometres north of Baghdad, claimed the lives of a teacher and three students driving away from the local polytechnic institute for oil, said police Major Hassan Salah.

Near Balad, in Nibai, police discovered at around 6 pm [1500 GMT] the executed bodies of an interpreter, a truck driver and a businessmen who had been working for the US army, said police Major Adel Abdullah.

Gunmen also shot dead a high-ranking police officer, Lieutenant Colonel Yussef al-Chalabi, in the afternoon when their black BMW pulled up alongside his car, said Major Mohammed Fathi.●