Qaeda Affiliate Is Blamed in Iraq Suicide Bombing

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but officials blamed Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni insurgent group that has conducted dozens of attacks in the city in recent years, including several in which the police and security officials were targets.

The attack was the deadliest in Iraq since insurgents promised to increase violence in response to the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on Monday.

Coming after a bombing attack killed 10 people in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad on Tuesday, the violence underscored the continuing challenges for Iraqi security forces to secure the country as American forces withdraw by the end of the year.

Although there are far fewer attacks than at the height of the sectarian war in 2007, there are still bombings and assassinations virtually every day.

“This was a breach of our security by Al Qaeda,” said Haider Zanbor, the head of the security committee in Babil Province, which includes Hilla. “We were expecting that Babil would be the target of revenge for the killing of Bin Laden. We will increase the security procedure to prevent this from happening again.”

Around 7 a.m., the bomber drove a car packed with explosives to a checkpoint outside the training center in downtown Hilla, detonating the explosives as a bus drove by, a security official said. A shift change at the training center increased the number of officers in the area, the official said.

The explosion knocked over several blast walls and damaged the front rooms of the training center, as well as several homes. Of those killed, 24 were police officers, as were many of the wounded, the provincial police said.

Local officials also blamed the central government in Baghdad for failing to protect them.

“The central government is responsible for this explosion,” said Kathum Majed Toma, the head of the Babil provincial council. “We requested many times for them to provide us with sonar devices to detect explosives and for them to hire more security forces so we can secure our province, but they did not reply.”

At a news conference in Baghdad on Wednesday, one of the country’s top law enforcement officials, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, said, “There are still some cells able to work in Iraq and able to implement a terrorist act.”

General Atta, the spokesman for the Baghdad Operations Command, which controls the police and army, stressed, however, that Iraqi forces were prepared to maintain security after American forces withdrew.

Yasir Ghazi and Duraid Adnan contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an employee of The New York Times from Hilla, Iraq.

View the original article here