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| Iraq |
| Iraq foils Qaeda suicide bomber prison break bid |
| 2009-10-03 |
| [Al Arabiya Latest] A would-be al-Qaeda suicide car bomber who planned to detonate his payload to help comrades escape from an Iraqi prison was foiled after a tip-off about the attack, security forces said on Friday. The man confessed to planning to blow himself up outside a prison in Hilla, the capital of Babil province, when he was apprehended at his house 35 kilometers (22 miles) north of the city, an Iraqi army official told AFP. "Our forces arrested a suicide bomber from al-Qaeda, while he was preparing a car bomb for an operation near the main prison in the centre of Hilla," he said. Violence in Babil, an ethnically mixed province south of Baghdad, is rare compared to cities such as Mosul and Baghdad. The prison has about 300 inmates, including members of al-Qaeda, and the army raided the house on Thursday night after a tip-off. "He confessed that he is a member of al-Qaeda and was planning to commit a suicide attack near the prison to facilitate the escape of al-Qaeda prisoners," the official said on condition of anonymity. Elsewhere on Friday, a former Iraqi army captain and a barber were killed in separate shootings as they walked to work in Diyala province, police said. Security forces in the western city of Ramadi, meanwhile, said they had arrested 13 men wanted for carrying out attacks on civilians, soldiers and police across Anbar, Iraq's largest province. Violent deaths in Iraq dropped by more than half in September compared to the previous month, official figures showed on Thursday, with 203 people killed across the country. The figures were markedly lower than the 456 people who died as a result of violence in August. September's death toll was the lowest since May, when a total of 155 people were killed. |
| Posted by:Fred |