52 Killed in Iraq; Bomber Attacks Newspaper

52 Killed in Iraq; Bomber Attacks Newspaper

by PAUL von ZIELBAUER | August 27, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 27 — A suicide car bomber attacked Iraq’s largest newspaper on Sunday, detonating his vehicle inside its fortified compound in downtown Baghdad and killing two people and injuring 20 others, the executive editor and government officials said.

The bombing was part of a violent day across Iraq in which explosions and gun battles killed at least 52 people, including an American soldier.

In Baghdad, a bomb planted in a commuter bus blew up near the pedestrian entrance of a downtown hotel, killing nine people and wounding 20 others, and a convoy ferrying a deputy defense minister came under heavy gunfire that wounded two bodyguards, two government officials said.

The bombing of Al Sabah, a national newspaper financed by the Shiite-led Iraqi government, also destroyed more than a dozen vehicles and caused the collapse of a quarter of the building where journalists and printing-press operators work, said the executive editor, Falah al-Mishaal.

The attack occurred around 8:30 a.m. local time, as guards carrying automatic assault rifles grew suspicious of the vehicle after it had been cleared to enter the newspaper’s parking lot, Mr. Mishaal said in an interview. Before the bomber could be shot, he blew up his vehicle sending at least two parked cars through the building’s wall.

“Tomorrow we will return to work again,” Mr. Mishaal said.

The attack was the second on Al Sabah — which means “morning’’ in Arabic — in three months. On May 6, a suicide bomber in a car set off an explosion at the newspaper’s main vehicle checkpoint, killing one person and wounding several others, Mr. Mishaal said.

He blamed the attacks on Iraqi insurgent and foreign terrorist groups, including the successor group to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was killed in an American airstrike in June.

“We have received many threats from Zarqawi’s assistant,” Mr. Mishaal said. “We published them in the newspaper.”

He said he believed that the bombing on Sunday came also in retaliation for a meeting of Iraqi television and newspaper editors organized by his newspaper this month where the editors were to sign a “pledge of honor” to respect the government’s reconciliation efforts and to avoid printing or broadcasting inflammatory statements or violent images.

“This is an attack against all Iraqi media,” Mr. Mishaal said in a telephone interview. “It is a kind of challenge and an attempt to get rid of all free Iraqi media.”

At least 16 journalists working for Al Sabah and a government-run Baghdad television station have been killed since 2003, media executives here said.

In a statement, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki “strongly denounced” the attack on Al Sabah, which he called “a pioneering media organization confronting terror, serving the truth and consolidating unity and national coherence.” Furthermore, he vowed to capture the people behind it.

And yet, in remarks closely following similarly upbeat statements by American military officials in Baghdad, the prime minister also sought to lend optimism to his government’s efforts to bring security to Baghdad and other violent parts of the country, and to rule out the possibility of civil war.

“We are not in a civil war. Iraq will never be in a civil war,” Mr. Maliki said, through an interpreter, in an interview with CNN on Sunday. “The violence is in decrease, and our security ability is increasing.”

Mr. Maliki’s statement stood in contrast to a far bleaker assessment he made in a speech to Parliament on July 12, when he said the country had one “last chance” to eliminate the sectarian and insurgent attacks destabilizing the country, and warned lawmakers that “if that fails — God forbid — I don’t know what will be Iraq’s fate.”

Also on Sunday, an Iraqi government official said the prison run by the American military at Abu Ghraib, which became notorious for the abuse of Iraqi inmates by American soldiers, had been emptied of inmates and was now under the control of the Iraqi Justice Ministry.

Saad Sultan, the supervisor of detention facilities in the government’s Human Rights Ministry, said in an interview on Sunday that more than 3,000 prisoners in American custody had been transferred to a detention facility at Camp Cropper, an American military base near Baghdad International Airport, on Aug. 15.

Mr. Sultan said the transfer was done “for security reasons, because Abu Ghraib is an unsafe area.” The prison has long been the target of frequent mortar fire from insurgent groups. The Justice Ministry, Mr. Sultan said, plans to use the prison as a temporary warehouse.

The closing of the prison was reported earlier on Sunday by McClatchy Newspapers.

Elsewhere in Iraq on Sunday, 21 people died in continuing sectarian violence in and around Baquba, a restive city 30 miles northeast of Baghdad where Sunni and Shiite Arabs have engaged in a longstanding cycle of retributive attacks.

A roadside bomb in Khalis, a town north of Baquba, killed six people and injured 15 others, a Baquba police spokesman said. Two truck drivers and three other people were also killed by gunfire in the city’s western suburbs, he said. A second attack in Khalis killed at least 10 additional people and wounded 10, said the provincial governor, Raad Rashid.

Near Kirkuk, a northern oil city on the border of the autonomous Kurdish region, four traffic policemen were killed in an roadside ambush as they traveled south toward Tikrit, Capt. Firas Mahmoud of the Kirkuk police said.

Also in Kirkuk on Sunday, a suicide bomber driving a truck full of explosives stormed into a building housing the offices of the main Kurdish political party, killing two security workers and injuring 16 others, Maj. Kamil Shakhwan of the Kirkuk police said. And a suicide bomb attack later on Sunday killed nine others, the Kirkuk police said.

In a market in Basra, a bomb attached to a motorcycle killed four people and wounded 15.

An American soldier was killed in Baghdad Sunday afternoon by small-arms fire, the military said. Another American soldier was killed Saturday by a roadside bomb that detonated near his vehicle in southeast section of Baghdad, the military said Sunday.

Ali Adeeb, Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, Omar al-Neami and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting for this article.