Bomb Kills 8 Workers, Injures 50 in Iraq

A bomb exploded alongside a group of men waiting for work in east Baghdad today, killing at least eight and wounding more than 50, police said.

Witnesses said a man placed a bag full of explosives near a cart that sold tea to the workers as they waited for daily construction jobs, said Col. Ahmed Abboud, chief of police in the New Baghdad area.

It was not known whether the dead included the bomber.

This morning’s violence followed a day in which a roadside bomb killed a British soldier in southern Iraq, police found the bodies of 16 handcuffed and blindfolded young men around Baghdad, and gunmen shot dead the wife and two sons of a Sunni Arab cleric north of the capital.

In a videotape aired on Al Jazeera satellite television, kidnappers threatened to kill German hostages Thomas Nitzschke and Rene Braeunlich if Berlin did not close its embassy in Iraq, withdraw all German companies from the country and stop cooperating with the Iraqi government within three days.

The tape showed Braeunlich speaking and clasping his hands in front of him as if begging. No audio was heard.

There was no word on Jill Carroll, a 28-year-old freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor also held hostage.

More than 250 foreigners have been taken captive since the war started and at least 39 have been killed.

British Cpl. Gordon Alexander Pritchard, 31, was slain Tuesday as he led a three-vehicle convoy hit by a roadside bomb in Umm al Qasr, near the border with Kuwait.

He was the second British soldier killed in Iraq in as many days and the 100th British military fatality since the conflict began in March 2003.

In the volatile west Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliya, 11 bodies were discovered in a truck, all shot in the head, police said. Five other men’s bodies were found near a sewage plant in the southeastern Rustamiya district, where sectarian death squads often leave corpses.

Gunmen also shot dead the wife and two sons of Sunni cleric Qassim Daham Hamdani on Monday night in Muqdadiya, about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad, police said. The cleric was not at home.

Two children died during a clash between U.S. troops and insurgents in the western town of Hit, U.S. Marine spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Pool said.

Two other Iraqis were shot and killed when they violated orders that residents stay in their homes during raids by paramilitary troops backed by U.S. forces in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, police said.

Three Iraqi soldiers were killed and six wounded in a gun battle in Buhriz, a Sunni town 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.