Baghdad police station attack kills at least 28 (Corrected)

Mar 8, 2009, 14:07 GMT

Iraqis carry the coffin of their relative, after claiming his body from a hospital morgue in Baghdad, Iraq on 08 March 2009. EPA/SHEHAB AHMED

Baghdad - At least 28 people were killed and 54 were injured when a man driving a motorcycle detonated explosives strapped to his body outside a police recruitment centre in Baghdad on Sunday morning, police, witnesses and medics told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The attack took place near the Ministry of Oil and Water Resources on the major Baghdad thoroughfare of Palestine Street. Hundreds of men had gathered outside an Iraqi security forces recruitment station looking for work, police said.

The strength of the blast, which was audible across eastern Baghdad, scattered body parts over a wide area, police and witnesses said. It was the deadliest attack in Baghdad in months.

Witnesses said they heard shots fired after the blast and saw helicopters and ambulances rushing to the scene.

Victims were taken to the Canadian hospital, to the Ibn Nafis hospital, and to hospitals in nearby Sadr City. Medics said the death toll rose rapidly throughout the day because of the severity of the injuries the wounded suffered.

The recruitment centre had been attacked before. In December 2008, twin bombings left 15 people dead outside the building. And in 2005, two women killed themselves and 40 others when they detonated explosives strapped to their body near the station.

Sunday's attack was the latest in a recent spike in violence across the country. On Thursday, a car bomb south of Hilla, the capital of the central Iraqi province of Babil, killed at least 10 people and wounded 60.

That bombing was quickly followed by a spate of attacks in the ethnically divided northern province of Nineveh, where Iraqi security forces three weeks ago launched a push to pacify the province, dubbed 'Operation New Hope.'

Police General Abdel-Karim Khalaf, chief of operations at the Iraqi Interior Ministry, on Sunday warned against viewing the recent spate of attacks as an indication that al-Qaeda had regained its strength.

'Al-Qaeda is conducting attacks with no planning and no clear goals,' Khalaf told dpa on Sunday. The recent bombings in Mosul 'were random, and did not cause as many casualties as did previous attacks.'

A second security source, speaking to dpa from Mosul on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, on Sunday cast the attacks 'as a natural response by al-Qaeda to the recent military operations.'

'They're an attempt to prove that al-Qaeda still exists, that it continues to operate in full force and that it has operational sleeper cells that can target security forces through car bombs, improvised explosive devices and assassinations,' he said.

The weekend's attacks followed a series of police raids into what a police source called 'hot' neighbourhoods in western Mosul on Thursday. Fifty-six suspected insurgents were arrested in those raids and two abductees were freed, police said.

Osama al-Najifi, head of the Sunni nationalist Hadba list that won January's provincial council elections in Nineveh on a platform of wresting power from Kurdish parties, on Sunday told dpa that he believed the violence there was a response to the elections.

'The forces behind the escalation in violence know that the coming period will be crucial' in shaping the province's future, he said.