Thursday, April 12, 2007

Eight killed, including three MPs, in Iraqi parliament bombing



"......U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the attack was carried out by those "who wish to stop the Iraqi people having a future that would be based on democracy and stability."

She said the Baghdad security plan was in its early stages and "we have said there will be good days and bad days."........

A witness said the blast appeared to take place inside a restaurant inside the building at a time when many members of parliament were having lunch.

The parliament building is located in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.

One of the dead lawmakers was Mohammed Awad, a member of the Sunni National Dialogue Front, said Saleh al-Mutlaq, the leader of the party, which holds 11 seats in Iraq's legislature. A female Sunni lawmaker from the same list was wounded, he said.

A security official at the parliament building said identified a second lawmaker killed in the blast as a Shiite MP. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

But Mukhlis al-Zamili of the Shiite Fadhila party said the second dead lawmaker was a Kurd. And he said six of those wounded were members of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's bloc.......

Earlier, a truck bomb killed at least seven people on a key bridge in northern Baghdad, destroying most of the steel structure and sending several cars plunging into the River Tigris below, police said.

Two main sections of the Sarafiya bridge, a main artery linking east and west Baghdad, collapsed into the river. One army officer on the scene said explosive charges might have also been used to bring down a bridge that local residents said was built by the British in the early 1900s.

Among the dead were four policemen who drowned after their car toppled into the river's muddy waters, police said......."

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