Easter Bombings Kill 22 in Baghdad

The Iraqi capital echoed with explosions on Easter Sunday, with three suicide car bombings killing 22 or more people. Other bombs and rockets went off at widely scattered locations, paralyzing traffic and disrupting communications throughout the city.

An official in the Ministry of Interior said there were three suicide bombers who targeted the Iranian embassy as well as the residences of the Egyptian chargé d’affaires and the German ambassador, all in Mansour and nearby on the western side of the city; he said that early reports were of 20 dead and 45 wounded in the three bombings.

Separately, a police official in Kerrada, a neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, said that a fourth suicide bomber had targeted the Iraqi intelligence agency’s offices but that police shot the driver before he could detonate his bomb. Bomb disposal experts were working to defuse it hours later, he said. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity in line with their agencies’ policies.

Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, spokesman for the Baghdad Operations Command, said that early and incomplete reports were that 17 were killed and 140 wounded, including both civilians and members of the security services. The car bombers, he said, were also wearing suicide vests when they launched their attacks. He speculated that the Mar Yosif Chaldean Catholic church in the Mansour area may have been one of the intended targets.

A spokeswoman for the church, Ann Sami Matloub, said that the church was packed with worshipers at the time but was not damaged by the blast. She said that the explosion was so close that Easter services had to be suspended for a short time until parishioners could compose themselves.

General Atta was critical of local news coverage of the bombings. “Some of the media had information even before we did, which means they had connections with the terrorists,” he charged during an interview on state-owned Iraqiya television.

A press release from the Baghdad Operations Command, which is in charge of security in the capital, said that the other explosions Sunday morning had included four improvised explosive devices, which killed no one. In addition, the command said, “two terrorists were killed and another one wounded” when the car bomb they were rigging in the Sadiya neighborhood in southern Baghdad exploded prematurely Sunday.

Without giving details, the command said it had arrested those responsible for launching rockets into the Jadriyah neighborhood of the city.

It was the first major suicide bomb spree in Baghdad since January, when three downtown hotels were bombed, killing 41 people. On Friday night, gunmen wearing army uniforms and posing as American soldiers killed 25 people, most of them members of the Awakening or Sons of Iraq groups or the Iraqi security services, in a village on the outskirts of Baghdad.

In addition, a series of rockets were fired into the Green Zone on Saturday night, but there were no reports of injuries.