Suicide bombs kill at least 47 in Iraq

BAGHDAD — Suicide bombers struck in force across Iraq on Saturday, killing at least 47 people and wounding scores more in an explosion of street violence after days of relative calm.

In the worst attack, a man posing as the driver of a truck loaded with bricks detonated a huge bomb at a police station under construction in the south Baghdad neighborhood of Dora, a Sunni insurgent stronghold.

Police said at least 20 people were killed, although the number continued to increase throughout the day as rescuers dug through the remains of the building. Among the confirmed dead were 14 police officers and three prisoners, who were killed when the building collapsed.

The explosion sent shockwaves through the city, with people as far away as the heavily fortified Green Zone several miles to the north thinking it had struck nearby.

Witnesses said the driver detonated his charge after he was stopped at a security gate entering the police compound. Still, they said, the building was virtually demolished. There were reports that insurgents fired on medical-aid and rescue workers responding to the blast.

Other reports indicated that joint Iraqi and American forces sometimes used the facility, but no Americans were present at the time of the attack. Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a spokesman for the U.S.-led military forces in Iraq, said the outpost is not one of the new "joint security stations" that are a fixture of the new security plan.

"There was a lorry [truck] which used to come every day together with the vehicles used in the maintenance work," said Ali Kareem Hasan, a laborer on the construction project. "The Iraqi police guards asked him to stop to be checked as they do every day, but he didn't. ... After some seconds, the lorry exploded."

A police officer, Jabbar Abdul Hassan Hamad, said he was sleeping in a guard room after finishing his shift when the bomb went off.

"I heard a very huge explosion, and then I was unconscious," he said. "I was evacuated from underneath the debris of the room."

A group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq, which is composed of al-Qaida in Iraq and other insurgents, claimed responsibility for the police-station bombing in a posting on the group's Web site. The claim could not be confirmed.

Police and civilian witnesses said American artillery units in south Baghdad began shelling date-palm orchards in the area in the afternoon. Insurgents frequently use the orchards as hiding places and staging grounds for attacks on security forces and, recently, Shiite pilgrims on their way to Karbala for religious ceremonies.

South of the city, near Hillah, a second truck-bomb explosion near a Shiite mosque that also houses a political office of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr killed 11 and hurt 45.

Another suicide bomber walked into a candy store in the northwestern city of Tal Afar and blew himself up, killing 10. Three more struck checkpoints and a police station on the northwestern border with Syria, killing six.