Iranian Missile Hits Baghdad School; 32 Die

An Iranian surface-to-surface missile scored a direct hit on a Baghdad elementary school Tuesday, killing 29 children and three adults and wounding 218 other people, according to a statement issued in the Iraqi capital.

Most of the wounded, 196 of whom were children, were in serious condition, the statement said.

A government communique declared that it is “Iraq’s right and duty to reply to this heinous crime. They want a ‘war of the cities’ and they will get it. Missiles will make them understand.”

The remark was a reference to periods in the seven years of the Iran-Iraq War when, unable to make gains on the battlefront, the two antagonists have bombarded each other’s cities in hopes of forcing a victory. More than one million people have died in the war, including a sizable number of civilians.

Tuesday’s missile attack against Baghdad was the fourth from Iran in the last eight days.

Iran is believed to have obtained a large stock of Soviet-made Scud B missiles from either Libya or Syria, its Arab allies in the war against Iraq, and is using them against Baghdad. The missiles carry more than a ton of high explosives.

The missile attack Tuesday knocked down more than 30 houses as well as flattening the Martyr’s Place Elementary School at 7:55 a.m., just as the school day was beginning.

“The children were singing songs in the playground when the missile landed,” Iraq’s director of external information, Salah Mukhtar, said. “The school has been destroyed, totally.”

Ismail Geitan Jassim, the school’s principal, told Reuters news agency that after the missile exploded, “I collapsed, and when I got up, it looked like a battleground, an earthquake. Everything was rubble.”

The Reuters correspondent described a scene filled with emotion, as parents beat their faces in grief as the bodies of their children were pulled from the wreckage of the building.

Iran said the missile was aimed at the Defense Ministry in Baghdad, but that facility, about 10 miles away, was undamaged. The Tehran regime said the missile was fired in retaliation for Iraqi air attacks on civilian targets, including a schoolhouse south of the Iranian capital.

Iraq said that the Iranian version of events “uncovered their lies.”

Iraqi officials took foreign diplomats on a tour of the scene.

One Western diplomat described the devastation as “very, very gruesome” and said he believed that the government’s casualty figures and account of the attack were for the most part accurate.

In other developments Tuesday, regional shipping sources reported that an unexploded missile that hit a Japanese-registered tanker last week had been determined to be from an Iraqi warplane.

The Tomoe 8 was hit by missiles near the Saudi Arabian port of Jubail last Thursday, but it had not been clear if the attack was from Iran or Iraq.

The case is significant because it appears to be another instance of Iraqi warplanes attacking a friendly vessel.

Last May, 37 American sailors were killed when an Iraqi warplane fired Exocet missiles at the U.S. frigate Stark.

Iraq said at the time that the attack was a mistake. But the Tomoe 8 incident showed that such miscalculations are still taking place in the deadly air war.

In the southern part of the gulf, 10 miles off the United Arab Emirates port of Dubai, Iranian Revolutionary Guards in gunboats Tuesday attacked the 39,115-ton Saudi Arabian oil tanker, Petroship B. There were no injuries or major damage. Revolutionary Guards made a similar attack on the same vessel Sept. 20.

Tehran radio reported that the Saudi ship had been attacked, but it provided no details other than saying the ship belongs to the Saudi Royal Family.

Four reflagged Kuwaiti tankers under U.S. Navy escort arrived at the sheikdom after a 550-mile voyage up the gulf during which no problems were reported. The convoy is the 11th since July, when Navy ships began escorting Kuwaiti vessels that were given American registration and flags.

In London, the British Defense Ministry said the mine hunter Brecon found two mines off the United Arab Emirates coast in the Gulf of Oman, just south of the narrow Strait of Hormuz that leads into the Persian Gulf.

Meanwhile, a five-ship Belgian-Dutch mine-hunting squadron sailed through the Suez Canal en route to join the international naval task force in the gulf.