Suicide Car Bomb Kills More Than 50 at Iraqi Police
Station
By EDWARD WONG
 SKANDARIYA,
Iraq, Feb. 10 — A car bomb exploded outside a police station in this
town south of Baghdad today, killing at least 54 people and wounding
about 60, a hospital official said.
The general surgeon at the hospital here, Mohammad
Gumar, said there were 51 dead at his medical center and 3 dead at a
hospital in the town of Hilla, south of here. The 3 were among 20
critically wounded people taken for treatment to Baghdad and Hilla, he
said.
The head of the Iraqi police force, Brig. Gen. Ahmed
Ibrahim, and another officer confirmed that the blast was the work of a
suicide bomber, but they were not sure how many people were in the car.
The bombing was the third deadliest incident since the
American-led invasion of Iraq, the latest in a string of attacks by
insurgents against Iraqis considered to be collaborators.
The dead and wounded were civilians who were standing at
the gate of the station waiting to apply for police jobs, officials
said. No policemen were killed, a local officer said, but nine
policemen were believed to have been wounded.
There was a near riot when General Ibrahim appeared at
the scene. Crowds had been kept about 150 yards away from the area by
American troops. When the general left the cordoned area to depart, the
crowd surged toward him, shouting anti-American slogans.
American troops then pointed their weapons at the crowd,
and the police chief was put into a squad car and taken away. The crowd
quickly ran away across the street.
About 30 minutes, later the troops left and the huge,
angry mob surrounded the station, with some people going inside. A
police officer fired his AK-47 assault rifle over the crowd's heads,
making the people angrier. The mob then threw stones at a police truck,
cracking the front window.
A police officer dived into the cab of the truck and
started the engine. One of the people in the mob tore off the
passenger-side mirror and hurled it at the truck as the officer quickly
backed the vehicle down the road.
A senior officer at the local police station, Col. Abdul
Rahim Falih, stood with tears in his eyes and said: "What did they do,
these people who were killed? People were hungry, they were hungry.
They came here to put food on their table and they have died."
Police Officer Abbas Hassan Alyan, 32, who was standing
at the gate of the station at the time of the blast, said he was thrown
into the air and then fell to the ground, slamming his head.
"I was unconscious for a few minutes, and later on I
gathered myself and stood up," he said. "I saw smoke everywhere. I saw
many, many bodies on the ground."
Officer Alyan, who was lying in a hospital bed wearing
his uniform, said, "I'm determined to stay on as a police officer." He
has been in the Iraqi force for eight months.
A civilian who had been standing farther back in line
waiting to pick up an application for a job, was lying in a bed in
another part of the hospital suffering from broken ribs.
The civilian, Kadum Hamid Kanoosh, 37, said, "I felt the
firebomb, then I lost consciousness."
He said that one of his brothers had been executed under
Saddam Hussein's government.
"I came to protect the country and the society," he
said. "I'm determined to apply to be a police officer. I want to serve
my city."
He also said he had a brother who worked as a police
officer in Baghdad and that two other brothers were waiting to apply
for jobs at the police station here at the time of the blast. They
escaped unhurt.
The front wall of the yellow-brick police station was
shorn off in the incident, which happened just after 9 a.m. in this
town 25 miles south of Baghdad. Glass was shattered around the area and
an overturned white sedan was blackened, indicating that it had been
set afire by the blast.
American troops sealed off the area around the station
immediately after the incident and at first refused to allow
journalists near the blast site.
A spokeswoman for the coalition press information center
in Baghdad, Master Sgt. Sonja Whittington of the Air Force, said no
coalition forces had been killed or wounded. She said members of the
82nd Airborne Division were aiding local officials and that American
medical personnel were helping take the wounded to hospitals.
Insurgents have mounted a string of vehicle and suicide
bombings in recent weeks. The deadliest was in the northern city of
Erbil on Feb. 1, when two bombers blew themselves up at two Kurdish
political party offices. A total of 109 people were killed.
On Jan. 18, a car bomb exploded near the main gate to
the American-led coalition's headquarters in Baghdad, killing the
driver and at least 31 Iraqis who were among 200 people lining up to
enter the building to begin their workday.
The worst previous car bombing before the Erbil attack
occurred Aug. 29 outside a mosque in the Shiite Muslim holy city of
Najaf, killing more than 85 people, including the Shiite leader
Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim.
Terence Neilan contributed reporting for this
article from New York.
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