Baghdad – A suicide car bomber apparently targeting a senior city official sent a ball of fire tearing through a busy square in a mainly Shiite area of Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least eight people, while four U.S. soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing.
The driver detonated his explosives as a convoy carrying the head of the Baghdad City Council, Sabir al-Issawi, was passing an Iraqi military checkpoint in the central Karradah neighborhood.
The council chief was unharmed, but three of his bodyguards were wounded, his deputy, Naeem al-Qabi said.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but suicide car bombings are the hallmark of Sunni insurgent groups, particularly al-Qaeda in Iraq. It was the second devastating blast to hit the thriving commercial district in four days.
An explosives-laden car rammed a flatbed truck packed with Shiite pilgrims there on Sunday, killing 32 people.
Four U.S. soldiers were killed, meanwhile, when a roadside bomb exploded Thursday in a mostly Shiite area of eastern Baghdad, the U.S. military said.
Two soldiers were wounded in the attack, which began when a bomb went off as a U.S. unit was returning from a search operation in the mostly Shiite area, the military said. Moments later, a second bomb exploded, killing and wounding the soldiers.
A demolition team that searched the site after the attack found an explosively formed projectile, a type of high-tech bomb the U.S. military believes comes from Iran. The device was detonated by the team.
Earlier, the military said a U.S. soldier was killed Wednesday in fighting in Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, while a Marine died the same day in a noncombat-related incident in Anbar that is under investigation.
In addition to the Karradah attack, a bomber slammed his explosives-packed car into an army checkpoint in a volatile Sunni district in western Baghdad, killing two people and wounding two.
A bomb in a parked car exploded as a bus packed with workers passed by in the city of Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad in the so-called “Triangle of Death,” killing at least four people and wounding 24, police said.
The top official in the main Shiite district of Sadr City was seriously wounded when gunmen ambushed his convoy in eastern Baghdad, killing two of his bodyguards, according to police and a local official.
Rahim al-Darraji had been involved in negotiations with U.S. and Iraqi government officials seeking to persuade the Shiite militias to tamp down the violence against Sunnis.
Police reported at least 25 other people were killed or found dead Thursday, including a vegetable seller who was hailed as a hero after he died when a bomb concealed in a package exploded as he was trying to carry it away from a populated area in Sadr City.
“May God bless his soul. He gave his life to save other lives,” fellow peddler Haitham Mohammed said, wiping away tears.
Twenty bullet-riddled bodies also were found, most of them in Baghdad.
In other developments, a judge said the death sentence for Saddam Hussein’s former deputy, Taha Yassin Ramadan, had been upheld on appeal, and the former vice president will be hanged for his role in the killing of 148 Shiites in 1982 in Dujayl, north of Baghdad.
Judge Mounir Haddad, a member of the court’s nine-judge panel, said the decision on Ramadan’s execution was unanimous and relayed to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government, which will set the date.
