Bombing At Iraqi Ministry Wounds 2 Top Officials

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
February 27, 2007
By Damien Cave
BAGHDAD, Feb. 26 — An explosion inside the Ministry of Public Works on Monday wounded an Iraqi vice president and the public works minister and killed at least five people, in what officials described as a possible assassination attempt.
Though it was unclear where in the building the bomb was hidden or who the target was, the attack was the most serious breach of an Iraqi government building since November, when dozens of employees at the Ministry of Higher Education were kidnapped by gunmen dressed in police commando uniforms.
Adel Abdul-Mahdi, one of Iraq’s two vice presidents, was approaching a conference room lectern to address ministry employees at the time of the blast, which tore through walls and hurled him to the ground, witnesses said. His guards threw themselves on top of him, and he was immediately taken to an American-run hospital inside the Green Zone where witnesses said he was received in a wheelchair, covered in dust but smiling.
Statements from several offices of the Shiite-led Iraqi government later said he was released and had returned to work.
The public works minister, Reyad Ghareeb, was seriously wounded, news agencies reported. It was not clear if his wounds were life-threatening.
The Ministry of Public Works is in the Sunni neighborhood of Mansour. Like nearly all government buildings in Baghdad, it is surrounded by 10-foot concrete blast walls and dozens of guards. Visitors to the building pass through metal detectors and are then searched by hand.
Witnesses and Iraqi officials said it was unclear whether a bomb had been carried in by an employee or had been slipped past security by a visitor.
Assassination attempts on Iraqi officials are not uncommon, and members of all sects have been singled out. Mr. Abdul-Mahdi and Mr. Ghareeb are both Shiites, and the Public Works Ministry is run by one of Iraq’s leading Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
Last fall, a car bomb exploded in the Green Zone near the convoy of the speaker of Parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashadani, a Sunni. Nasreen Barwari, a Kurd and the former public works minister, said three attempts were made on her life during her tenure from 2003 to 2006.
She said satellite offices of the ministry were regularly singled out as well.
“I believe all governmental offices are a target all the time,” she said. “And the main objective is to undermine the government as a whole, and discredit its security measures or plans.”
Witnesses said the vice president, the minister and several senior ministry officials had gathered in a conference room on the third floor to give employees awards when the blast shredded rows of chairs and collapsed part of the roof onto the victims.
“While Dr. Abdul-Mahdi was trying to deliver his speech, the explosion took place,” said a ministry employee, also wounded in the attack, who had been sitting next to the vice president. If it was a suicide bomber, the employee said, “there would have been more people killed.”
Interior Ministry officials said three of the five people killed were women. Four of the dead held the rank of director general in the Public Works Ministry — the middle managers who run the organization on a daily basis.
On Monday, a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad killed two policemen. A mortar shell exploded in central Baghdad, where security forces have set up blast walls around open-air markets, killing two people and wounding four. Gunmen attacked a fire station in Mansour, in western Baghdad, killing three firemen and wounding three others.
Authorities found 25 bodies throughout the city.
Also on Monday, the political bloc loyal to anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr clarified the cleric’s stance on the new Baghdad security plan, saying that Mr. Sadr still supported the plan despite a statement attributed to him on Sunday saying that the effort to pacify the capital was doomed to failure because it relied on American troops.
Saleh al-Ugaili, a member of Parliament and a spokesman for Mr. Sadr’s political movement, said the statement was meant to emphasize a need for more Iraqi control.
“Everybody knows that the American intervention in the duties of the army and Iraqi police confuses their work and creates opportunities for breaches,” he said.
The American military said in a statement on Monday that elements of Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia “seem to be practicing a policy of noninterference,” with many senior leaders leaving the country and others adopting a “wait-and-see” attitude.
The military also announced the death of a marine killed Monday during combat in Anbar Province.
President Jalal Talabani’s office said Monday that he was recovering from exhaustion at a hospital in Jordan and denied reports that he had heart surgery.
Ali Adeeb and Qais Mizher contributed reporting.
 
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