Truck explosion kills 18 in Baghdad
Three US soldiers die in gunfire north of capital
BAGHDAD - A truck packed with rockets blew up yesterday in a Shi'ite area of Baghdad, killing 18 people in the deadliest single blast in the city in more than three months. Three US soldiers were killed by gunfire north of the capital.
A US military spokesman said the blast appeared to have been an accident that occurred as Shi'ite militiamen were transporting the weapons through a densely populated neighborhood of northern Baghdad - possibly to fire at a nearby American base.
Iraqi police said a suicide truck bomber had targeted the house of an Iraqi police general, who was not at home but whose nephew was among those killed. US officials said 75 people were wounded, and police said they included the general's elderly parents.
But the US military disputed the police account, saying Shi'ite extremists were transporting rockets and mortars on a tractor-trailer when the weapons mistakenly exploded. Witnesses also confirmed the vehicle was carrying weapons.
"They were trying to attack us . . . and it went off" accidentally, said Lieutenant Colonel Steve Stover, a US military spokesman, who provided the death toll. "They wouldn't waste rockets like that" on a suicide attack.
The force of the blast crumbled several two-story buildings, buried cars under rubble, sheared off a corrugated-steel roof, and left a large crater on the street.
It was the deadliest single explosion in Baghdad since March 3, when a suicide car bomber killed 22 people in eastern Baghdad. Sixteen people died in a mortar attack in the Shi'ite militia stronghold of Sadr City on April 9.
The carnage yesterday was a grim reminder of the bombs and killings that rocked the capital before President Bush rushed about 30,000 reinforcements to Iraq last year to curb a wave of Shi'ite-Sunni slaughter.
The violence has dropped sharply since a May 11 cease-fire ended seven weeks of fighting between US and Iraqi soldiers and Shi'ite militiamen in the capital's Sadr City district.
Nevertheless, a car bomb exploded last night in the Shi'ite district of Karradah in east Baghdad, killing seven people, including three policemen, and wounding 11, according to police and hospital sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not supposed to release the information.
The three American soldiers died when gunmen opened fire on them near the town of Hawija, 150 miles north of Baghdad, a US military statement said.
Their deaths brought to at least 4,090 the number of American military personnel who have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Hawija, once a hub for Sunni militants and disaffected allies of Saddam Hussein, was believed to have been pacified in recent months. Last year the town was the scene of one of the largest ceremonies where tribal sheiks joined forces with the Americans to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq.
South of Baghdad, Iraqi villagers and soldiers unearthed at least 13 bodies from a shallow, dusty grave in farmland on the outskirts of Latifiyah, a mostly Sunni town that also has Shi'ite residents. The bodies were first discovered Tuesday, but digging continued a day later.
The US military said American soldiers, acting on a tip from a local citizen, found at least 10 decomposed bodies Tuesday in the sewer shaft of a building in east Baghdad. Those victims appeared to have died more than two years ago during the height of the sectarian reprisal killings, the military said. 