Hotel Blast in Baghdad Kills 27

A huge car bomb ripped through a five-story hotel on a downtown side street Wednesday night, killing at least 27 people, igniting nearby buildings and tossing cars like matchsticks.

Dozens were injured in and around the Mount Lebanon Hotel, where 10 foreign guests were staying.

Flames leapt from the windows of the blasted hotel facade as the injured staggered or were carried on makeshift stretchers. Hundreds of people rushed into the confusion out of curiosity or a desire to help in a largely futile search-and-rescue effort.

The hotel is in the center of Baghdad, four blocks from Firdos Square, where 11 months ago Iraqi civilians and American soldiers toppled a statue of President Saddam Hussein, an image broadcast around the world. Iraqis and Americans are preparing to mark the first anniversary of the beginning of the war against Hussein on Saturday.

The hotel seemed an unlikely target for a major terrorist action. It is not one of the main hotels housing Western contractors or others working with the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, and even some of its neighbors struggled to remember its name.

The building was only lightly defended, however, making it easy for attackers to bring a bomb-laden car to within a few feet of its front doors.

The explosion was a ghastly reminder of how difficult achieving peace and stability has been in Iraq. More than 500 U.S. soldiers have died in the last year, and a much larger number of Iraqis have perished, many of them in terrorist bombings. The latest bombing occurred on a day when the U.S. military was mounting a new security sweep against insurgents in Baghdad.

Despite the unrelenting violence, Iraq’s economy recently has shown signs of revival, and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council this month passed a provisional constitution containing a strong bill of rights. Hours before the blast, the council had written U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan asking for assistance from the world body in holding free elections by January.

The magnitude of the explosion -- which damaged buildings several blocks away and left a 15-foot-wide, 7-foot-deep crater -- convinced military and other U.S. security personnel at the scene that it had been an extraordinarily large bomb. Col. Ralph Baker, of the 1st Armored Division, estimated that it weighed more than 1,000 pounds.

Walid Mohammed Abdel Maguid, 16, described the blast as “a huge boom, followed by complete darkness and the red glow of fire.”

Framed against the glow of the flames, would-be rescuers used shovels and their bare hands to pick through the concrete, steel and broken glass debris in search of survivors.

A house across the street was also burning and a second one collapsed, leaving only parts of its walls standing.

Ragged shards of shrapnel were lying on the ground hundreds of yards away, and the windows of hotels, shops, apartments and two hospitals a block away from the blast were shattered, scattering broken glass on the pavement.

Water from fire hoses mixed with the pungent effluent of broken sewer pipes, and rescuers and American soldiers struggled to keep their footing in the debris.

From the burning houses, people wept as they searched for missing relatives, while some tried to rescue valuable power tools from a wood workshop as the flames licked the beams over their heads.

At least eight cars were destroyed in the blast, some twisted like pretzels. Huge electrical generators, used to compensate for the city’s frequent outages, were blackened and crushed like cardboard.

On a gurney in the main street, next to a police car, a man lay with exposed torso, his pants legs ripped off and his face blackened with burns.

Assad Aboud Kamal, the 50-year-old owner of the Der al Zud Hotel on the opposite side of the street, bled from a cut over his eyebrow. He stood near his 16-year-son, Haider, whose face was heavily bandaged.

“We don’t know who did this, but we deeply believe it was a rocket instead of a car bomb, because we first heard the sound of a whoosh,” he said.

He blamed the United States for not blocking such attacks. “I can say that the Americans are doing these things to have an excuse to stay longer.”

In Washington, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan condemned the bombing as “a terrible terrorist attack on innocent civilians.”

“This remains a time of testing in Iraq,” McClellan said. “The stakes are high. The terrorists know the stakes are high. But they will not prevail. We will meet this test with strength and with resolve.... Democracy is advancing in Iraq, and we will continue to stay to finish the job for the Iraqi people.”

President Bush has sought to link the war in Iraq to the larger war on terrorism, although critics disagree and argue that Al Qaeda terrorist network and similar groups were never active in the parts of Iraq that were under Baghdad’s control until after the U.S.-led invasion. Now officials are convinced that some foreign terrorists have crossed the country’s porous borders and established links with Hussein loyalists and home-grown Islamic extremists to use terrorist tactics against the U.S. and its allies.

Although it is not known who carried out Wednesday’s attack, suspicions immediately fell on these groups. Col. Baker said the blast suggested characteristics of the bomb that exploded at the United Nations headquarters here in August, killing 22 people, including U.N. special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. That bomb was made of a combination of plastic explosives and artillery shells from the former dictator’s stockpile.

Wednesday’s bombing was the largest since the March 2 attacks in Karbala and Baghdad that killed at least 181 people on the main Shiite holy day of Ashura. Large bombings have become a recurring tragedy in Iraq, striking Iraqi police, Kurdish political organizations, foreign workers and hotels, coalition forces and U.N. offices.

Military investigators were uncertain whether the latest attack was a suicide bombing, said Lt. Col. Peter Jones, the Army commander for neighborhood where the blast occurred. Some witnesses said the car carrying the bomb was still moving slowly when it exploded, he said, indicating that a driver may have been inside.

The military determined it was a car because the engine block was found, he said.

Although several people at the scene spoke of a warning given to the hotel, Jones said that the hotel owner denied having any foreshadowing of an attack.

He said the hotel had 15 staff members and 10 registered guests, whose nationalities included British, Lebanese, Egyptian and Jordanian.

Jones said there were 15 confirmed deaths but at least 27 people were believed to have died and 45 were injured, included at least three Americans. It was not clear whether the injured were in the hotel or outside when the blast occurred.

There were conflicting reports about whether Orascom, an Egyptian conglomerate that won one of the contracts to operate a mobile telephone network in Iraq, was using the hotel to house foreign employees.

Some neighbors and soldiers on the scene said Orascom was still at the hotel, though others said it had checked out weeks ago.

Jones said the foreign guests were businesspeople but he had no details about the companies they worked for.

Some of the fatalities occurred at the two large houses across the street and at another hotel up the street that caters chiefly to Arab guests.

One of the houses belonged to a Christian family of seven, neighbors said, and about 10 people were living in the other. It was unclear whether any of the residents were among the dead.

Some agitated bystanders shouted anti-U.S. slogans as American troops arrived in Humvees to try to clear the scene and restore order.

An FBI official in Washington said the bureau’s forensic experts and bomb squad technicians were on the scene and working with local authorities to determine who might be behind the bombing and whether it was connected to other attacks, particularly those using powerful explosives.

“We are assisting the police there with forensics,” said the FBI official, who declined to be named.

The official refused to comment on any findings, but emphasized that the investigation had just begun.

Because the United States is the lead occupying power in Iraq, and U.S. citizens may have been injured, the FBI is expected to play a central role in the investigation, as it has in other bombings in the country.

Times staff writer Josh Meyer in Washington and Suhail Ahmed of The Times’ Baghdad Bureau contributed to this report.