Abu Ghraib Blast Injures 4

A suicide bomber driving a tractor blew himself up near Abu Ghraib prison Monday, wounding four civilians, and the U.S. military announced that inmates at Camp Bucca had injured four guards and 12 detainees in a protest Friday.

U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill said Monday that Abu Ghraib officials had heard an explosion but it wasn’t close enough to cause any damage to the facility.

The blast killed the tractor driver and injured four Iraqis, police 1st Lt. Akram Zubaeyee said.

The same facility was the site of a larger attack Saturday, in which 44 American soldiers and 13 prisoners were injured. The U.S. military said that one insurgent was killed and about 50 wounded, after dozens of guerrillas besieged the prison, attacking with car bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms and mortar fire. Al Qaeda in Iraq said in an Internet posting Monday that 10 of its fighters had died.

Abu Ghraib, a U.S. military-run prison outside Baghdad, was at the center of an abuse scandal last year after photographs were publicized showing American soldiers mistreating Iraqi inmates.

At Camp Bucca, the largest U.S. detention facility in Iraq, prisoners set fire to tents and threw rocks Friday to protest the transfer of several detainees whom authorities had deemed unruly, the American military said Monday.

None of the injuries was serious.

Murtadha Hajaj, an official at radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr’s office in the southern city of Umm al Qasr, near Camp Bucca, said that several Sadr supporters were wounded during the confrontation.

He said they were protesting a lack of access to medical treatment.

Rudisill denied that any detainee was deprived of medical treatment.

Elsewhere Monday, an American soldier was killed and another was wounded by insurgent gunfire in the northern city of Tall Afar, the U.S. military said.

In the same city, a bomb exploded at a cafe, killing two civilians and injuring 13, local official Salem Haj Eissa said.