11 killed in Baghdad bomb blast
A roadside bomb rocked an eastern Baghdad Shiite neighbourhood early today, killing at least 11 people and injuring 19 others when it exploded next to buses used by morning commuters.
Elsewhere, embattled Prime Minister Nouri Maliki met behind closed-doors with Iraq’s top Shiite cleric in Najaf to brief him over efforts to fill Cabinet jobs vacated when ministers from the largest Sunni Arab bloc and the movement of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr pulled out to protest the prime minister’s policies.
The bomb went off in the predominantly Shiite neighbourhood of Baladiyat just before 8am local time.
Nine people were killed instantly by the blast, according to police, while a medic in nearby Kindi hospital said two others died there shortly afterward from their injuries.
It was not immediately clear who was responsible, but the blast came on the fringes of Sadr City, al-Sadr’s stronghold. Al-Sadr last week declared a six-month “freeze” on his Mahdi Army militia’s operations but warned he could reactivate it at any time if he thought necessary.
The announcement came after clashes in the Shiite city of Karbala between Mahdi Army forces and a rival Shiite militia.
In a pre-dawn raid in Karbala today, US forces captured an Iraqi believed to be working as the local contact to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’s elite Quds Force to supply Shiite militias with Iranian-made weapons, said US Army Maj. Winfield Danielson.
The suspect is also believed to have helped transport Iraqis to Iran for “terrorist training,” Danielson said in an email. The military said it was believed that he is “closely linked to individuals at the highest levels” of the Quds Force.
US forces were led to the suspect, whose name was not released, by information from prisoners, Danielson said.
Ground troops confiscated computer equipment, communication devices, miscellaneous documents and photographs, the military said.
Following Maliki’s meeting in Najaf, 45 miles south-east of Karbala, with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the premier told reporters there were “issues which I always find necessary to hear his views on”.
In addition to filling the Cabinet posts, Maliki said he also discussed the possibility of forming a new government altogether or putting together one made up of non-partisan technocrats – though emphasised it was currently only an “idea” that was being considered among others.
He did not give a time frame for making a decision. But Maliki made it clear his government cannot go on indefinitely with an incomplete team of ministers, as has been the case since six Sadrist ministers quit in April over his failure to announce a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops in Iraq. The Sunni Arab ministers withdrew in August.
