5 Apr 2010

Suicide car bombers kill 41 in Iraq

7:12 am on 5 April 2010

Three suicide bombers detonated car bombs in a coordinated attack on foreign embassies in central Baghdad on Sunday, killing as many as 41 people and wounding more than 200.

The blasts near the Iranian, Egyptian and German embassies, followed mortar attacks on the Iraqi capital's Green Zone, home to government buildings, official residences and foreign embassies.

Two days earlier, gunmen slaughtered 24 people in a Sunni village south of Baghdad.

Authorities had warned of a possible escalation of violence after the 7 March parliamentary election produced no clear winner.

After parliamentary elections in 2005, sectarian violence exploded when politicians took more than five months to form a government.

Embassies targeted

One of the bombs on Sunday blew up in front of the main gate of the Iranian embassy, just outside the Green Zone, destroying about 30 cars.

The Iraqi Finance Ministry said the nearby offices of its budget directorate and the government real estate bank were damaged.

At the Egyptian embassy, the bomber rammed his car into a concrete blast wall, causing a 3 metre deep cater in the street.

Baghdad security spokesman Qassim al-Moussawi said Iraqi security forces defused a fourth car bomb in the al-Masbah district of central Baghdad and arrested the would-be bomber.

Germany's Foreign Ministry said an Iraqi security guard working for the German embassy was among the dead.