Blasts kill 20 Iraq police recruits
Pastor Dale Morgan
Blasts kill 20 Iraq police recruits*
By Marwan Ibrahim
May 29, 2008 08:47pm
Article from: Agence France-Presse
AT least 20 people were killed and 42 wounded in two suicide bombings
targeting police and security forces in northern Iraq today, officials said.
A man in a explosives-packed jacket blew himself up at a recruitment
centre in Sinjar, a town west of the provincial capital Mosul on the
road to Syria, killing 17 people, officials said.
Interior ministry spokesman Major General Abdul Kareem Khalaf said the
bomber targeted a centre that recruited personnel for the police and
security services in the area.
"Seventeen people were killed in the attack that targeted the
recruitment centre,'' Maj-Gen Khalaf told said in Mosul, the capital of
Nineveh province. Hospital sources said about 30 people were wounded.
Sinjar police chief Lieutenant Colonel Awad al-Sourge said 14 of the
dead were people who had come to the centre hoping to enlist. The other
three victims were two policemen and a civilian.
Police said many people had gathered hoping to hand in papers to join
the police and security services when the bomber struck.
A few hours earlier, a suicide bomber drove into a group of police
officers and detonated his explosives in Al-Gabat, just north of Mosul,
police captain Aziz Imara said.
At least three people, including two policemen, were killed and 12
people were wounded, he said, adding that the blast had also damaged
shops and restaurants.
The two bombings shattered a relative calm across Iraq. The US military
had said violence across the nation had hit a four-year low last week.
Iraqi security forces backed by the US military have been conducting a
major crackdown against jihadists in the Nineveh province since May 14
and had claimed that al-Qaeda in Iraq had been largely banished from the
region.
Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, is regarded by the American military
as the last urban bastion of al-Qaeda in the country.
Iraqi security forces had said they detained 1030 suspects during the
crackdown and believed that about 2000 jihadists may have fled to
neighbouring provinces as well as the capital Baghdad.
On Monday, Iraqi troops in Mosul said they arrested six teenage boys
suspected of being forcibly trained by al-Qaeda to carry out suicide
bombings.