BAGHDAD: A powerful car bomb exploded in a crowded market area of Baghdad yesterday, killing 51 people and wounding 75, in the deadliest attack in the Iraqi capital in months.
Police said the bomb was placed in a pickup truck parked next to minibus taxis near the main market in the Shi'ite neighbourhood of Al Hurriya in northwestern Baghdad. The explosion left a heap of smoking, mangled wreckage.
When the bomb went off, the market was packed with shoppers buying food before returning home.
A few weeks ago, the US military announced that violence in Iraq had dropped to a four-year low.
The blast set fire to 20 shops and levelled a multi-storey building, a security source said. It damaged many vehicles and cut off electricity to the area.
Baghdad has been relatively quiet since a May 10 truce ended weeks of fighting between security forces and militiamen loyal to anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr.
Earlier, the US military said it killed four Al Qaeda militants in a raid in the northern city of Mosul, but Iraqi police said the three brothers and their father shot in the operation were not insurgents.
In the last few months, Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki has gone on the offensive, sending the Iraqi army into Shi'ite militia strongholds in Baghdad and the southern oil city of Basra and cracking down on Al Qaeda in Mosul.
In the latest phase of his drive to extend government control over areas dominated by Shi'ite militias, Maliki has ordered army and police units to the southern city of Amara in preparation for an operation promised for later this week.
Meanwhile, artillery units killed most of a 21-member Kurdish rebel group in northern Iraq as it moved towards the Turkish border, the Turkish military said yesterday.
The military's website said the shelling had rendered the group trying to sneak into Turkey "ineffective".
The rebels were targeted some three km from the shared border in Iraq's Zap region, the statement said.
The military has launched several aerial cross-border attacks on suspected rebel positions in northern Iraq this year.
The 2005 shooting death of a Reuters journalist in the midst of a firefight in Baghdad was justified because US soldiers believed the camera protruding from an unmarked car was a rocket propelled grenade, the Pentagon's internal watchdog has concluded.
In an 82-page report, the Defence Department's inspector general also said that Reuters safety practices contributed to the death of sound technician Waleed Khaled and the wounding of cameraman Haider Kadhem.
The report was critical of how the initial investigation was conducted as it said the military unit's investigating officer did not follow correct procedures. It concluded, nevertheless, that a "preponderance of evidence establishes that the cameraman and driver took actions during the incident that reasonably led US soldiers to believe they were confronting hostile intent."
