Mosque, Hotel Blasts Shake Iraq
For the second time in a month, Western journalists were a target. And for the second time, the attack failed.
The tactic in the assault against the Hamra compound was the same as in the Oct. 24 assault on the Palestine hotel. One car bomber blew a hole in a protective wall so a second vehicle could penetrate the defenses and strike at the hotel.
But the tactic didn't work Friday. The second vehicle — a water tanker — got stuck in the debris from the explosions and exploded before reaching the target, reports CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier.
At the Palestine, a hail of U.S. gunfire and concertina wire kept the vehicle far from the building when it exploded. Windows were blown out, but the journalists inside escaped serious harm, Dozier reports.
Still, eight Iraqis died around the Hamra compound — some in apartment houses ripped down by the blast.
The death toll Friday was far higher in Khanaqin, a sleepy, mostly Kurdish town of ramshackle commercial buildings and mud-brick houses 90 miles northeast of Baghdad near the Iranian border.
Suicide bombers wandered into two Shiite mosques during noon prayers and detonated explosives hidden beneath their clothes. At least 74 people were killed and about 100 were wounded, according to the local hospital.
At sunset, hours after the nearly simultaneous bombings, dozens of people were still searching for relatives and friends. Others collected shredded copies of the Muslim holy book, the Quran.
The blast near the Hamra hotel in Baghdad knocked down the blast walls protecting the hotel and blew out windows, but did no structural damage.
"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.
The blasts — less than a minute apart — reverberated throughout the city center, sent a mushroom cloud hundreds of feet into the air and was followed by sporadic small arms fire. At first the target appeared to be an Interior Ministry building nearby where U.S. troops found about 170 detainees, some of whom appeared to be tortured.
Several residential buildings collapsed from the blast, which gouged a large crater in the road. Firefighters and U.S. troops joined neighbors to dig through the debris and under toppled blast barriers to pull victims from the rubble.
In recent developments:
The Baghdad blasts appear to be the second attack 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.
"The investigation is under way, but the initial reports indicate so far the first car bomber was trying to pave the way for the second one, not on the main road, but on a secondary road to get in and hit the Hamra hotel, not the interior ministry," Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, the deputy interior minister, said.
Saad al-Ezi, an Iraqi journalist with the Boston Globe, said from inside Hamra hotel that it was clearly the target.
"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."
The bloodshed came as the United Nations' top human rights official added her voice to calls for an international inquiry into allegations that Iraq's U.S.-backed government tortures and abuses prisoners — including Sunni Arab insurgents.
Tensions escalated after last weekend's discovery of 173 malnourished detainees — some bearing signs of torture — in an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad seized by American soldiers.
Most of the prisoners are believed to have been Sunni Arabs, and the discovery lent credence to allegations of abuse leveled against troops controlled by the Shiite-led Interior Ministry.
Interior Minister Bayn Jabr said the torture allegations were exaggerated, but the government has agreed to investigate lockups nationwide.
Sunni Arab politicians and clerics have demanded an international investigation and have said they would not accept findings of any probe in which the Iraqi government played a role.
Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, endorsed calls for an international probe "in light of the apparently systemic nature and magnitude of that problem."
"I urge authorities to consider calling for an international inquiry," the former U.N. war crimes prosecutor said in Geneva.