Car bomb aimed at police kills five in Baghdad

By Lutfi Abu Oun and Michael Georgy

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A car bomb aimed at Iraqi police
commandos killed five civilians in Baghdad on Tuesday, police
said, in an attack that underlined the security challenge
facing Iraq’s still incomplete government.

Police said seven police were wounded in the blast. It was
one of a number of attacks across the country, including
another car bomb in Shi’ite east Baghdad late in the afternoon.
Casualty figures were not immediately available, police said.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki sought to fill the interior
and defense ministry posts to complete a government announced
on Saturday that he hopes can avert a sectarian civil war.

Political sources said the main Shi’ite and Sunni Arab
alliances were exchanging lists of their candidates during
talks. The Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front denied media reports
that the new culture minister from their bloc had already quit.

Maliki, a tough-talking Shi’ite Islamist, has vowed to use
“maximum force” to wipe out Sunni insurgents fighting to topple
Iraq’s U.S.-backed leaders. He has also opened a door to
negotiations with those willing to join the political process.

Maliki will be hard-pressed to convince Iraqis that he can
make quick progress in the fight against guerrillas comprised
mostly of Saddam Hussein loyalists and al Qaeda militants led
by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Where the car bomb detonated, shaken Iraqis stood around
examining burnt-out cars and shops.

“The bomb exploded and flipped a minibus. What can we do?
We just try to earn a living,” said shopkeeper Abu Mohammad.

Elsewhere, gunmen killed three men and wounded seven among
a crowd of day laborers seeking work on farms north of Baghdad.

The attack occurred at Aswad, a mainly Sunni town near
Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) northeast of the capital. The laborers
were mostly from nearby Huwaider, a Shi’ite town.

In Baquba itself, gunmen shot dead three old men sitting in
front of a house, police said. In northern Iraq, four people
were killed in a drive-by shooting in the city of Mosul.

SENSITIVE CHOICES

Maliki faces a highly sensitive task in choosing interior
and defense ministers whose main mission will be to combat
Sunni insurgents and check the sectarian violence that erupted
after a Shi’ite shrine was bombed in February.

Sunni leaders have accused the Shi’ite-run Interior
Ministry of supporting militia death squads, a charge it
denies.

The killing of a 12-year-old Shi’ite boy suggested communal
passions would stay aflame.

Gunmen in three cars cornered Hani Saadoun at a checkpoint
on Monday. His body was found on Tuesday, dumped in an empty
lot in the troubled Sunni district of Dora in southern Baghdad.

Interior Ministry sources said he was bound and blindfolded
and had been shot in the head and chest. His body showed signs
of torture with electric drills and cables.

While young children have been kidnapped for ransom or
blown up in bombings, relatively few appear so far to have been
caught up in tit-for-tat sectarian abductions and killings.

Saadoun’s uncle, a respected freelance journalist, said
police and Iraqi soldiers had refused to help retrieve his body
on the grounds that Dora was too dangerous.

“He had nothing to do with sectarianism or politics,” said
the uncle, asking that his name not be used for fear of
reprisals. “He was just a boy.”

A U.N. report detailed mounting sectarian violence after
the February 22 bombing of the shrine in the city of Samarra,
which touched off a wave of killings that sparked fears of
civil war.

Hundreds of civilians are reported killed or wounded every
week in violence that has forced more than 85,000 people to
flee their homes, the report said.

“Women, children and professionals, including academics and
judges, were increasingly targeted by the on-going violence,”
the bi-monthly human rights report said.

It also said that out of 28,700 detainees in Iraq, more
than 5,000 were held by the Interior Ministry, even though it
should only detain people for short periods of time.

“Torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment
are allegedly common practice in some facilities,” it said.

(Additional reporting by Aseel Kami, Mariam Karouny and
Alastair Macdonald in Baghdad)