Iraq's Shi'ite vice-president and a cabinet minister were
wounded in an apparent assassination attempt Monday when a bomb
killed six people at a ministry in Baghdad where they were
attending an official ceremony.
Police sources said Public Works Minister Riad Ghareeb, also a
Shi'ite, had been seriously wounded in the blast at a hall of the
ministry. Aides to Vice-President Adel Abdul-Mahdi said he was
suffering light wounds caused by shrapnel.
The attack was the latest in a series that defied a security
crackdown in Baghdad that is seen as a final attempt to halt
all-out civil war in Iraq.
Aides to the vice-president, a member of the Shi'ite majority
that dominates the US-backed government, said he was later
discharged from a US military hospital in the Green Zone, a vast
government compound that also houses the US Embassy, and that he
had returned to his office.
Police said he was still in hospital.
"He has light shrapnel wounds in different parts of his body but
it is not serious," a political source from the ruling Shi'ite
Alliance said, referring to the vice-president.
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The cause of the blast was under investigation. But militants are
increasingly using suicide vests to launch attacks due to tighter
checks on roads aimed at reducing car bombs.
One witness said the force of the blast had thrown Abdul-Mahdi
against a wall at the ministry, in the Sunni Arab neighborhood of
Mansour in western Baghdad.
"When the blast occurred, Abdul-Mahdi was thrown against the
wall. All his guards threw themselves on top of him," the witness
said.
Ghareeb's deputy had also been taken to hospital. Several senior
ministry officials were among those killed, police said. The bomb
wounded 31 people.
Iraq's leaders are often targeted by militants engaged in
Shi'ite-Sunni sectarian fighting.
Around 100,000 US and Iraqi troops have been deployed in
Baghdad, the epicenter of Iraq's violence, to carry out the nearly
two-week old security plan.
Despite the push, violence has continued every day, piling
pressure on Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to crack down on
both Sunni Arab insurgents and Shi'ite militias.
A female suicide bomber killed 40 people in a college in Baghdad
on Sunday and a truck bomb near a Sunni mosque in western Anbar
province killed 52 on Saturday.
Iranian weapons
Renewing accusations that Iranian-made weapons are being used by
Iraqi militants fighting American troops, the US military showed
Monday what it said was a large cache of Iranian bombs found in a
raid north of Baghdad on Saturday.
The cache, displayed to reporters at a US military base in
Baghdad, included components to fabricate sophisticated roadside
bombs, mortar bombs and rockets.
Washington, which accuses Shi'ite Iran of fanning violence in
Iraq, is particularly concerned about so-called "explosively formed
penetrators", a deadly Iranian-made roadside bomb the US military
says has killed 170 US soldiers in Iraq since 2004. Teheran denies
it fuels violence in Iraq.
Military officials said the weaponry showed Monday was clearly
made in Iran. They said there was no way to know if the Iranian
government was involved in supplying the weapons.?
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(China Daily via agencies February 27, 2007)
