BAGHDAD, Iraq — The young man wore a winter jacket and approached the polling station with his hands in the pockets.

"Take your hands out of your pockets," said Ali Jabur, the Iraqi police officer in charge of patting down voters on the street outside. The young man obliged by throwing his arms wide — and blew them both to bits.

Three hours later, some very determined voters were still stepping around bits of his body as they streamed into the Badr Kobra High School for Girls, intent on casting the ballots that they called a repudiation of the terrorist attacks meant to scare them away.

"I would have been happy to have died voting at the time of this explosion, because this is terrorism mixed with rudeness," said Saif Aldin Jarah, 61, a balding man with white hair who leaned on his daughter, Shyamaa, as he shuffled into the afternoon sunlight after casting his ballot.

"When terrorism becomes aimless and without a goal, it becomes rudeness," Jarah said, holding aloft a finger stained indigo with indelible ink. "How could they force people not to vote?"

The question was answered emphatically in Baghdad's Zayuna neighborhood.

The blast at the high school killed five people and wounded seven. It blackened the pavement and brought a U.S. Army patrol racing to the tidy streets of the upper-middle-class neighborhood. It also could have done what Abu Musab al Zarqawi said the violence was intended to do: Derail the election. Zarqawi's al-Qaida-affiliated insurgent group claimed responsibility for some dozen suicide attacks yesterday.

When the suicide bomber at the high school struck shortly before 11 a.m., the polling site had been growing busy after a slow start. But Hadi Saleh Mohammed, the election official in charge, felt he had no choice but to close it down. There were the wounded to evacuate, a gruesome mess to clean up, security to reassess.

While all that went forward, the voters stood at the end of the block, waiting.

So the poll reopened. On the advice of the American troops, the security perimeter was pushed back a block, so people could be frisked twice before entering the school.

Though performing this duty meant standing amid flecks of the flesh of the last person to approach the checkpoint, there were volunteers. In stepping forward to do the first round of pat-downs themselves, local residents explained that they could raise the alert if another suspicious stranger approached.

"The police might not be able to recognize residents; we know them better," said Zaid Abdulhamid, an electronics merchant. He was stationed at the head of an alley blocked by the trunk of a date palm, the all-purpose roadblock in Iraq. The Arabic words spray-painted on the surrounding walls read: "No to America. No to occupation," and "Death to anyone who hates Iraq."

"We want to protect ourselves," Abdulhamid said.

And so, after about an hour, voting resumed.

Najila Amin, a housewife who felt the massive blast in her home, made her way to the scene of the crime.

"We're used to explosions," she said. "It's normal."

What surprised her, Amin said, was the steady stream of people walking past her window toward the school. Twenty people were in the street at any moment, stepping carefully in places the street cleaners had missed.

"I didn't expect such numbers," Amin said. "It makes me feel people want to protect themselves and have a government that can protect us."

The American troops left after a couple of hours, handing off security to an Iraqi National Guard major and at least a dozen Iraqi police officers, most of them in street clothes.

"This doesn't stop the process," said Sgt. Tahsin Hassan, carrying a pistol in his belt and a look of deep fatigue. As he spoke, shots from an assault rifle sounded not a block away. The sentries looked around, but no one on the street so much as flinched, not even a child of 4 clutching his father's hand on the way to the polls.

"We've had enough of this situation," Hassan said. "It becomes normal to us.

"We hear after the elections the situation will stabilize. People want stability."