Bomber Kills 7 in Iraqi Capital

A suicide attacker set off a massive car bomb here Sunday, killing himself and seven others and injuring dozens more outside a hotel frequented by American officials, businesspeople and members of the Iraqi Governing Council.

The blast at the Baghdad Hotel rattled a city already on edge from months of violence. It was the second deadly bombing in four days and the ninth since August, all unsolved. On Thursday, eight Iraqis died in a suicide bombing at a police station in a Baghdad slum.

Sunday’s attack occurred about 12:45 p.m. when the bomber raced a white Toyota Corolla toward the hotel after guards lifted a steel security bar to let three SUVs exit the compound, witnesses said. The guards opened fire as they saw the driver was not going to stop, but the car continued about 20 yards into the complex and exploded at the entrance of the hotel driveway, leaving a 6-foot-wide crater in the asphalt.

Six of the dead were Iraqis. The seventh was the driver of a second vehicle that U.S. authorities said may have been involved in the attack, possibly as a decoy. But it was unclear whether that vehicle carried explosives.

Luay Ali, 26, was working in his adjacent travel agency when, after an enormous roar, the ceiling fell down on him.

“Everything was dark, and everything was dust, and I couldn’t see anything,” he said. Iraqi police pulled him from the wreckage and gave him first aid for a head wound.

“It’s so hard to live like this, never feeling secure,” he said, his white shirt soaked on one side with blood. “I expect it will get worse -- worse and worse than this.”

The U.S.-led occupation authority has struggled to establish security and stem the fear and uncertainty that have reigned over much of Iraq as an increasingly organized and sophisticated resistance has emerged in the last few months. Since Aug. 7, bombers have struck at the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, at a major shrine in the holy city of Najaf and at the U.N. headquarters in the capital -- twice.

Asked by reporters Sunday night when such attacks might end, senior coalition spokesmen said the violence was expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

“There is a certain core element that will continue to attack the coalition and the Iraqi people no matter what we do, and we recognize that fact,” said Lt. Col. George Krivo, a U.S. military spokesman.

U.S. officials said seven people in addition to the one confirmed suicide bomber were killed in Sunday’s blast. Ten others were seriously wounded and 15 were characterized as “walking wounded,” according to another military spokesman, but some hospital officials spoke of 30 or more injured.

In the hotel, a member of the Governing Council, Mouwafak Rabii, suffered an injury to his hand. A U.S. soldier suffered a minor injury and was treated at the scene.

But most of those injured were Iraqis: guards and people standing or driving along the street. Many were members of the Iraqi Facilities Protection Service, a paramilitary organization founded by U.S. forces to protect strategic buildings and sites and to relieve U.S. troops for more important tasks.

A reporter and a photographer from the Los Angeles Times had just driven past the hotel when their car was shaken by an enormous boom. They turned to see two nearby cars burst into flames and a huge plume of black smoke rising.

The impact of the bomb was so fierce it toppled several 12-foot-high concrete barriers that had been installed like a wall along the street in front of the hotel to improve security. The barriers had been erected after an August truck bombing at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.

Within minutes, firefighters arrived to douse the flames, but they were hampered by a badly leaking water hose. Residual explosives from the car bomb continued to crack and pop for several minutes, preventing emergency workers from reaching the wounded.

Stunned, bleeding victims staggered down the street pressing towels and shirts against their injuries and pleading for help. Several of the guards, shaken and tearful, hugged one another as ambulances arrived and then raced away with the injured.

A short while later, resting on a cot in the emergency area of Al Kindi Hospital, 21-year-old Yasser Amr Majid said he had been in a bank next to the hotel when the bomb went off. His back was to the window that faced the street, and at the moment he heard the explosion, he felt a hot spray of broken glass and shrapnel pierce his back.

“I knew it was a bomb, a big one,” he said, wincing as a doctor examined his wounds. “All the windows were smashed at once, and we were swept off our feet as if by a wave.”

Outside the hospital, a veiled, blood-splattered woman was helped from her car to a wheelchair; another man with a bloodied shirt front, looking shocked, staggered toward the emergency-room entrance.

“I can’t hear anything,” whispered Amar Mahdi, a 33-year-old driver who works for the hotel, his face and chest speckled with shrapnel wounds. He said he was about 10 yards away when the car bomb went off.

“There was gunfire, and then the blast.... I felt our car fly up and then fall down hard,” he said. “I saw terrible injuries -- two of my colleagues died before my eyes.”

In the hotel, terrified guests and employees dropped to the floor to avoid the spray of imploding window glass. “We looked up and saw a huge ball of fire,” a waiter in the hotel’s lobby restaurant said.

Heavy security and secrecy have surrounded the Baghdad Hotel from the early days of the occupation, and many people in the city have speculated about its occupants. Some believe it houses the Baghdad contingent of the CIA, while others think it is used by Israeli entrepreneurs or a former head of Iraqi intelligence working for the United States.

Officials remained somewhat coy on the topic Sunday, citing security concerns. A coalition spokesman, Charles Heatly, said the hotel was leased by the coalition for unspecified coalition employees and contractors. But he said categorically that it was not “a CIA facility.”

For several hours after the blast, American helicopters circled over the scene and hundreds of curiosity-seekers and journalists packed the area, held back by a line of increasingly irritated American soldiers and Iraqi police.

Agents with the FBI and the military’s Criminal Investigative Division, supported by Iraqi police, cordoned off a mile-square area. Investigators began a grisly search for body parts, finding what was reported to be either a hand or foot believed to be from the bomber. A U.S. soldier stood guard over the remains.

In spite of the carnage, Col. Pete Mansoor, U.S. commander for central Baghdad, praised the Iraqi guards for preventing greater casualties by opening fire.

“The security worked as planned,” he said. “We are very proud of the Facilities Protection Service forces. They did exactly as they were trained to do. And they prevented a greater loss of life by preventing this car from getting close to the hotel.”

The top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, expressed condolences but said once again that conditions in Iraq were improving.

“The terrorists know that the Iraqi people and the coalition are succeeding in the reconstruction of Iraq,” he said. “They do not share the vision of hope for this new Iraq. They will do anything, including taking the lives of innocent Iraqis, to draw attention away from the extraordinary progress made since liberation.”

But for some Iraqis, the attack only heightened their sense of frustration, particularly because there have been no arrests in any of the recent bombing investigations.

“It is astonishing that so many people are killing themselves to harm Iraqis,” said Akram Adil, a hotel worker.

Ammar Abdirida, 26, was sitting in his bookshop near the hotel when he heard the blast. “If I were a little bit closer I would have died,” Abdirida said. He called the situation in Baghdad “unbearable.”

In addition to the hotel bombing, coalition forces were attacked in at least 22 other separate incidents Sunday, Krivo said, including with an improvised bomb hidden in a lamppost that injured passengers in a car driving near the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Baghdad. Another roadside bomb in Tikrit wounded three U.S. soldiers, one seriously. On Sunday night, a U.S. military spokesman said, a soldier was killed and another wounded when their vehicle struck a land mine near the town of Bayji in northern Iraq, Reuters reported.

On Saturday, coalition forces were attacked in 28 incidents, nearly double the average daily number cited in the early months of the occupation. Krivo insisted the overall number of attacks had risen and fallen and was not increasing as a rule.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Sunday’s bombing, although one group that has denounced the U.S.-led occupation expressly denied any involvement.

“We have no connection to this,” said Sheik Abdul-Hadi Darraji, a spokesman for a young Shiite Muslim cleric, Muqtader Sadr, who has declared an intention to form a new government and shoulder aside the U.S.-appointed Governing Council. “Those who carried out this action are trying to find ways to divide us.”

Sadr, son of a revered cleric who was killed in 1999 by Saddam Hussein’s security forces, has been galvanizing opposition to the American military presence among Shiites, although his popular following thus far appears limited.

U.S. officials and the Governing Council have treated Sadr’s declarations somewhat dismissively, but military authorities said they would deal harshly with any armed elements of Sadr’s militia, which has been patrolling parts of Sadr City. Two U.S. soldiers were killed there last week when they were lured into an ambush by locals who called for help, coalition military authorities said.

Two Iraqis were also killed, apparently in a subsequent gunfight.

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE ---

In stories after April 9, 2004, Shiite cleric Muqtader Sadr is correctly referred to as Muqtada Sadr.

--- END NOTE ---