As Iraqis grow confident in security, bombings kill 35

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-09-16 09:38

BAGHDAD -- A female suicide bomber blew herself up Monday among police officers who were celebrating the release of a comrade from US custody, killing at least 22 people, Iraqi officials said. Separate bombings in Iraq killed another 13 people.

Residents gather at the site of a bomb attack in Baghdad September 15, 2008. Two parked car bombs killed 12 people and wounded 34 others when they exploded in quick succession in central Baghdad's Karrada district, police said. [Agencies]

The suicide attack happened in Diyala, a province northeast of Baghdad where Sunni insurgents have carried out persistent attacks despite security gains elsewhere in the country. The bomber targeted the home of a police commissioner who had been detained by American troops for allegedly cooperating with the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia.

Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim al-Rubaie, the military commander in Diyala, said most of the 22 fatalities were police and that 33 people were wounded in the evening attack in Balad Ruz, 45 miles (70 kilometers) northeast of Baghdad.

Two police captains and three lieutenant colonels were among the dead, said a police officer who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

The US military confirmed that the bomber was a woman but gave a lower casualty toll, saying 17 Iraqis were killed, including the city's deputy chief of police, and eight other people were wounded.

Al-Rubaie said police had gathered to celebrate Iftar, the meal that breaks the sunrise-to-sunset fast during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, with Adnan Shukr al-Timimi, a police commissioner who was held at US-run Camp Bucca, a detention center in southern Iraq. Al-Timimi, who had invited friends and relatives to a banquet, and his parents and two children were among the dead, a hospital official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Al-Rubaie also said the attacker was a woman. Insurgents are increasingly turning to women to launch suicide attacks because they can conceal explosives more easily under long garments and evade searches by male security guards, and possibly because the male pool of suicide recruits is smaller than in the early days of the war.

In a similar attack on August 24, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a celebration to welcome home an Iraqi detainee released from US custody, killing at least 25 people. The attack occurred inside one of several tents set up outside a house in the Abu Ghraib area on Baghdad's western outskirts, according to residents and police.

The US military said Monday that it had released a total of 1,167 detainees in Iraq in the first two weeks of Ramadan, and that projections for releases in the third week "are more ambitious and assume no delays or unexpected interruptions to the release process."

In a statement, the military said there were about 18,900 detainees in detention, down from a high of 26,000 in November 2007.

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