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46 Iraq Sunnis Killed in Revenge Rampage

Posted on: Sunday, 15 October 2006, 12:00 CDT

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Suspected Shiite militiamen killed at least 46 Sunni Arabs in a weekend rampage of revenge killing in a city north of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said Sunday, raising the toll in the latest sectarian bloodletting there to 63.

A string of bombings in the northern city of Kirkuk killed 10 people, including two girls who died when a man detonated explosives strapped to his body in front of the al-Mallimin girls high school in downtown Kirkuk, police officials said.

The U.S. military reported the deaths of a Marine and four soldiers. The Marine was killed in combat in Anbar province, the Sunni heartland west of Baghdad on Saturday.

Three soldiers died in a roadside bombing Saturday south of Baghdad, and one soldier was killed in a roadside bombing Friday night southwest of the capital.

The sectarian killings Saturday and Sunday in Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, were in apparent retaliation for the slayings of 17 Shiites, whose decapitated bodies were found in an orchard on the town's outskirts on Friday.

Extra police flooded into the city and a curfew was imposed, Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said. Additional security measures were taken in other villages in the predominantly Sunni area, a hotbed of the insurgency battling U.S. and Iraqi forces.

Nevertheless, the killings raged through the night, with bullet-ridden bodies being delivered to the Balad's main hospital into Sunday morning, according to a hospital director who asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisals.

An army officer in the nearby city of Tikrit confirmed the death toll and said 63 suspects - both Sunnis and Shiites - were arrested.

In the attacks in Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, five people also died when a suicide bomber targeted a convoy of the Facilities Protection Service that guards government buildings and infrastructure. Ten others were wounded in that attack, according to police Brig. Sarhat Abdul-Qadir.

Three other people were killed and eight injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a market in the southern section of the city, Abdul-Qadir said.

In Baghdad on Sunday, Interior Ministry undersecretary Hala Shakir Salim survived a roadside bomb attack that killed seven others, four bystanders and three bodyguards, police Capt. Mohammed Abdul-Ghani said. The Interior Ministry runs Iraqi police forces.

A husband, wife and two of their sons were killed, and two daughters-in-law critically wounded Sunday morning when gunmen burst into their home in Mosul, Iraq's third largest city 225 miles northwest of Baghdad. Police Col. Eid al-Jibouri said the identities of the attackers and their motive were unknown.

South of Baghdad, three women and four men were killed in drive-by shootings in the predominantly Shiite village of Wahda on Saturday afternoon, according to provincial police spokesman Lt. Hadi Hassan.

Two policeman were killed in attacks by unidentified gunmen in the northern city of Mosul and in Suwayrah, 25 miles south of Baghdad, police spokesmen said.

A bomb also exploded Sunday morning in the old bazaar in the southern city of Basra, injuring three people, police Capt. Karim al-Zaidi said.

Separately, Iraq's Central Criminal Court sentenced an al-Qaida member to death and convicted 64 others on charges of belonging to armed groups and other crimes, the U.S. military command said Sunday. The military's statement did not name the man condemned to death, but said he was a "known member of the al-Qaida organization."

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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