At least eleven Iraqis were killed and 33 hurt, and up to 16 coalition troops, plus one American, wounded in a double suicide car bomb attack on a Polish logistics base at Hilla south of Baghdad on Wednesday.
| Zarqawi's offensive continues, looking for the big casualties... |
âWe received five killed, three men and two women, and 33 wounded,â said Hilla hospital official Ahmed Khadem, while doctors said a married couple were killed and their two sons, one a baby and the other five years old, wounded. But the number killed was later confirmed as 11 by a spokesperson for the US-led civil administration in Iraq said. âWe can confirm that more than 11 Iraqis were killed,â Coalition Provisional Authority spokeswoman Hilary White said. âIt killed men, women and children.â
| Doesn't matter to Zarqawi. What's important is that they're dead... |
An Iraqi Civil Defence Corps commander, Laith Hussein Abbas, said the first vehicle exploded 200 metres from the cement barriers shielding the base, called Camp Charlie by the Poles.
| Shouldn't that be "Camp Czarly?" |
Officials said the second vehicle failed to explode in the twin attack at around 7:15 am but the driver was shot dead by troops guarding the base.
| Maybe why it didn't explode. Only 36 virgins for him... |
The blast badly damaged three neighboring homes. âI was home when I heard two explosions, one after the other,â said Kassem Nahid, 25, whose head was taped with bandages. Jittery Polish troops were pushing people away from the site of the blast.
| Multiple explosions always make me jittery, too... |
At least two Iraqis died and eight members of coalition forces were wounded, Polish Lieutenant Colonel Robert Strzelecki said earlier. The dead were apparently the drivers of the explosives-laden vehicles, which drove at the base, while the injured included six Polish troops, one US national and one Hungarian, according to a Polish military statement. In Budapest, however, Hungarian defence ministry spokesman Peter Matyuc told AFP that 10 Hungarian soldiers were injured, two of them seriously. He also said six Polish troops and one US national were wounded. Strzelecki said only one of the two cars had exploded when it pulled up to the base 100 kilometres south of Baghdad. The second had been stopped when guards shot its driver dead, he added. In Warsaw military spokesman Colonel Zdzislaw Gnatowski said the Mongolian guards had brought one of the vehicles to a halt with automatic weapon fire then shot the driver when he tried to escape.
| No nonsense to the Mongolians, is there? |
He said it was the first such attack on the Polish base. Matyuc said the Hungarian soldiers were injured by shrapnel after one of the two vehicles, which he described as trucks, exploded, blowing out the windows of the brick building where the troops were staying. Matyuc said the other truck failed to explode because it was held up by a brick barricade that surrounds the camp. |