22 die in Baghdad bus station bombing
Published 9:00 pm Thursday, June 28, 2007
BAGHDAD – A car bomb exploded Thursday at a bus station in a mostly Shiite west Baghdad neighborhood, killing 22 people. Officials received word that 20 decapitated bodies had been found near the capital but were unable to confirm the report because of fighting.
In addition to the dead, more than 50 people were wounded in the rush-hour blast in the Baiyaa neighborhood, police said.
A huge fireball incinerated about 40 minibuses as people were lining up to catch rides to work, police and survivors said.
Television news video showed the area littered with smoldering vehicle parts and charred bodies – their clothing in tatters. Bystanders, some weeping, gingerly loaded human remains into ambulances and pickup trucks.
No group claimed responsibility for the blast, but suspicion fell on Sunni militants.
Baiyaa is a mixed neighborhood with a Shiite majority, part of a string of neighborhoods just south of the main road to Baghdad International Airport where sectarian tensions have been running high.
One American soldier was killed Thursday and another was wounded by a roadside bombing during a combat patrol in eastern Baghdad, the U.S. military said.
To the south, two policemen from separate commands said villagers had reported finding 20 beheaded bodies near the Sunni Muslim village of Um al-Abeed. The village is near the city of Salman Pak, 15 miles southeast of the capital.
Villagers said the victims were all men aged 20 to 40 and that their hands and legs had been bound, the two officers said.
Fears of more sectarian violence rose Thursday when radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr vowed to go ahead with a planned march July 5 to the devastated Askariya shrine in Samarra.
Al-Sadr, head of the notorious Mahdi Army militia, said the goal was to unite Sunnis and Shiites against the Americans and Sunni extremists responsible for attacks against civilians.
But the government and Sunni organizations have urged al-Sadr to cancel the march, fearing it will provoke attacks by Sunni insurgents and further enflame sectarian violence.
The Feb. 22, 2006, bombing of the Askariya shrine provoked a wave of Shiite-Sunni reprisal killings that plunged the nation to the brink of all-out sectarian war. A blast June 13 destroyed two minarets that had survived the 2006 explosion.
U.S. military deaths
Latest identifications reported by the military of U.S. personnel killed in Iraq:
Army Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Winder, 32, Blanding, Utah; died Tuesday in Diwaniyah from small-arms fire; assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), Fort Lewis.
Army Sgt. Joel Dahl, 21, Los Lunas, N.M.; died Saturday in Baghdad of wounds from small-arms fire; assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis.
Army Sgt. Trista Moretti, 27, South Plainfield, N.J.; killed by indirect fire Monday in Nasir Lafitah; assigned to the 425th Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, Fort Richardson, Alaska.
Marine Cpl. Derek Dixon, 20, Riverside, Ohio; died Tuesday during combat operations in Anbar province; assigned to the 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
