Iraq bomb targets police station

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A suicide car bomber crashed a white Oldsmobile into a police station in Iraq’s largest Shiite Muslim enclave Thursday, killing himself, nine others and wounding as many as 45. Earlier, gunmen – one dressed as a Muslim cleric – shot and killed a Spanish military attache.

The violence, six months to the day after Baghdad fell to American forces, underscored the predicament of a capital whose deliverance from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny has been repeatedly undermined by terrorism, attacks on U.S. forces and sectarian unrest.

The ancient city’s landscape is now lined with massive concrete blast barriers and coils of barbed wire outside hotels, government departments and along stretches of road near U.S. military bases.

As in previous attacks, there was no claim of responsibility for the 8:30 a.m. bombing in Sadr City, a Baghdad district with an estimated 2 million Shiites.

“It was a huge blast, and everything became dark from the debris and sand. I was thrown to the ground,” said Mohammed Adnan, who sells watermelons opposite the police station.

Policemen and some in the crowd that gathered outside the police station after the explosion offered an assortment of possible culprits ranging from non-Iraqi Arab militants to Hussein loyalists and Shiite radicals angry about a cleric’s arrest.

The killing of the Spanish military attache happened across town in the upscale Mansour area about 30 minutes before the car bombing.

Jose Antonio Bernal Gomez, an air force sergeant attached to Spain’s National Intelligence Center, was shot to death after four men, one dressed as a Muslim cleric, knocked on the door of his home, according to a Spanish diplomat in Baghdad who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A guard in the area said Gomez opened the door to the gunmen. When they tried to grab him, he ran outside and was shot. The guard said he heard six shots, and Gomez was hit in the head at least once.