Guards kill a bomber in Baghdad

The guards protecting a Baghdad police recruitment station asked the woman approaching in an enveloping cloak to stop, but she kept coming.

Three policemen were injured when they shot the woman walking toward a crowd of recruits Tuesday, setting off the explosives she had concealed under her traditional abaya, police said. But a potentially deadlier attack was averted on a day when at least 64 Iraqis were either found dead or were killed by bomb blasts, mortar fire or other violence across the country.

In the day’s worst attack, a suicide car bomber detonated his payload in a market west of Baghdad, killing at least 15 people and injuring 13, the U.S. military said.

An American soldier was killed when his patrol was attacked with small-arms fire in a southern section of the Iraqi capital, the military said. At least 3,497 U.S. military personnel have been killed since the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, according to the icasualties.org website, which tracks casualties.

Iraqi police and army recruits are frequent targets of Sunni Arab insurgents fighting U.S.-led forces and their Iraqi government allies, but attacks by female suicide bombers are rare.

About 150 applicants had gathered to submit paperwork at a recruitment center in the Baghdad Canal district when guards spotted the woman.

“All who come to the center are men. It is strange that a woman is coming. This draws the attention of the guards,” said Brig. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, which oversees police.

The guards ordered the woman to stop, but another ministry officer said she ignored their instructions, insisting that she had questions about her brother’s application.

The guards fired a warning but she kept walking, said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to deal with the media. “Then they shot her, and she blew up,” he said.

Because of the frequency of attacks, Iraqi officials have stepped up security measures at police and army recruitment centers. Most are protected by concrete blast walls, and officials try to limit the number of applicants who turn up at any one time by processing their paperwork in batches.

The use of women, who normally attract less attention than men, to stage such attacks could be a response to these measures. On April 10, a woman blew herself up among recruits in the city of Muqdadiya, about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad, killing at least 19 people and injuring 33.

It was not immediately clear why the suicide car bomber targeted the market in Ameriyat Fallouja, about 35 miles west of Baghdad. But the attack happened in a region where Al Qaeda-linked insurgents are battling Sunni Arab tribes that have joined forces with the U.S. military and Iraqi government.

Police in Baghdad recovered 33 unidentified bodies, all shot execution-style, a hallmark of sectarian killings.

At least eight other bodies, some of them showing signs of torture, were recovered in strife-torn regions south of the capital, where Sunni and Shiite Muslim groups have been clashing for months.

Among other violent incidents of the day, gunmen in the Sunni town of Jabella, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, assassinated Abdul Raheem Nayif, the local head of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr’s political movement. Gunmen later attacked a minibus carrying mourners from the funeral, injuring eight of them, police said.

On the political front, the Iraqi parliament on Tuesday passed a nonbinding resolution calling on the government to consult legislators before asking the United Nations to extend the mandate for U.S.-led forces to remain in Iraq when it comes up for renewal at the end of the year.

The measure in parliament was spearheaded by Sadr’s followers, who oppose the U.S. presence here, and won support from Sunni Arab politicians and some other Shiites. A total of 85 of the 144 lawmakers present supported the resolution; no count was taken of those opposing the measure or abstaining.

The measure initially included a provision calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, but voting on that portion was delayed in order to drum up more support, lawmakers said. A majority of legislators agree with Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite, that U.S.-led forces should remain in Iraq until the country’s own security forces are stronger. However, there is frustration at the time this is taking.

Maliki’s aides had asked lawmakers not to support the measure, said independent Kurdish representative Mahmoud Othman, who did not vote for the resolution. But he said the move was largely symbolic, since it did not require Maliki to heed parliament’s advice.

In other developments, the U.S. command said five missing British contractors could have been kidnapped by the same radical Shiite group that was implicated in the deaths of five American soldiers in the city of Karbala in January.

The military believes last week’s kidnapping might have been retribution for the killing of two cell members last month, said a senior military officer who requested anonymity. The group’s alleged leader, Azhar Dulaimi, was killed in a gunfight with U.S. forces in Baghdad, and another suspected member, Wissam abu Qadr, died in a British-backed operation in the southern city of Basra.

Last week’s brazen abduction, in which dozens of gunmen in police uniforms seized the British computer expert and his four guards from a Finance Ministry building in Baghdad, bore similarities to the assault in Karbala, 50 miles to the south. In that attack, guerrillas posing as Americans entered a provincial government building, killed one U.S. soldier and abducted four others before killing them.

The search continued, meanwhile, for two U.S. soldiers missing since a May 12 assault on their patrol south of Baghdad. Al Qaeda-linked insurgents claimed in a video released Monday to have killed the two but offered no proof.

“Most of the soldiers I have talked to see the release of the video as a despicable act, and it has just strengthened their resolve to find our missing soldiers and bring those responsible to justice,” said Army Maj. Webster Wright, a spokesman in the region where the search is taking place.

Four U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi soldier serving as an interpreter were killed in the initial ambush, and three Americans were captured.

The body of one of the missing soldiers, Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr. of Torrance, was pulled from the Euphrates River on May 23.

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zavis@latimes.com

Times staff writer Saif Hameed and special correspondents in Baghdad, Fallouja and Hillah contributed to this report.