Baghdad bombs kill three
A pair of bombs ripped through central Baghdad just after dawn today, killing three people and injuring 21, police said.
The bombs, designed to kill the maximum number of people, were planted next to each other and were detonated in succession in Baghdad’s Tahariyat Square, police 1st Lt. Thaeir Mahmoud said. Many were injured as they rushed to the scene of the fist explosion.
The fresh violence came amid rising fears in the Iraqi capital that Islamic extremists were now targeting men in shorts. An Iraqi tennis coach and two of his players were shot to death last week in Baghdad because they were wearing shorts, authorities said, reporting the latest in a series of recent attacks attributed to Islamic extremists.
A US Marine AH-1 Cobra helicopter, meanwhile, crashed yesterday and its two crew members were missing in Anbar province, a volatile area west of the capital where insurgents are active. Hostile fire was not suspected as the cause of the crash, the US military said.
In the Baghdad incident, gunmen stopped a car carrying the Sunni Arab coach and two Shiite players, asked them to step out and then shot them, said Manham Kubba secretary-general of the Iraqi Tennis Union.
Extremists had distributed leaflets warning people in the mostly Sunni neighbourhoods of Saidiyah and Ghazaliyah warning people not to wear shorts, police said.
“Wearing shorts by youth are prohibited because it violates the principals of Islamic religion when showing forbidden parts of the body. Also women should wear the veil,” the leaflets said.
No one claimed responsibility for the slayings, which come amid worries that Islamic extremism is spreading in the war-torn country.
Sunni cleric Eid al-Zoubayi denounced the attack.
“Islamic religion is an easy religion and it allows wearing sport shorts as long as they don’t show the forbidden parts of the body, so the acts that are targeting the sport are criminal,” he said.
It was the second incident involving athletes in just over a week. Fifteen members of a taekwondo team were kidnapped in western Iraq while driving to a training camp in neighbouring Jordan on May 17.
More than 30 people were killed in attacks across Iraq yesterday, including four who died when a bomb in a parked car exploded near a busy bus station in southern Baghdad. Seven people also were wounded in the blast, which bloodied passers-by and damaged a local restaurant.
Meanwhile, Iraqi politicians continued to bicker over candidates for the key defence and interior ministry posts, leaving Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government incomplete a week after it assumed office.
“We hope the agreement will be reached within two or three days,” Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi told reporters. “I think that to linger and take some time in choosing the ministers is better than rushing into it.”
Filling the two posts is a contentious matter, especially after the recent surge in sectarian violence.
Political parties have agreed that a Sunni will head the Defence Ministry, which controls the army, and a Shiite will run the Interior Ministry, which oversees police forces. But they are struggling to find a consensus on who should get the jobs.
Also yesterday, a senior US military official said coalition forces could begin transferring security control over some Iraqi provinces to civilian authorities and police by the end of summer, but Baghdad would not be handed over before the end of the year.
The military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, estimated that provisional control could be handed over to local governors in the relatively peaceful provinces of Najaf, Karbala and Babil by the autumn.
