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Police chief dies at earlier attack site

By Washington Post
Published January 25, 2008

BAGHDAD - A provincial police chief was killed by a suicide bomber in the northern city of Mosul on Thursday while inspecting the scene of a massive attack that killed 38 people a day earlier, signs that the city has become a crucial hub for the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaida in Iraq.

Duraid Kashmoula, the governor of Nineveh province, said the number of people killed in Wednesday's attack had increased to 38 because additional bodies had been recovered and because survivors had died of their wounds. The revised death toll made Wednesday's attack the deadliest in Iraq since mid December. Kashmoula said 134 people had been wounded.

Mosul was placed under curfew Thursday as angry mobs accused Iraqi soldiers of causing the Wednesday blast when they improperly detonated a weapons cache. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent a task force to investigate the incident as lawmakers called on the government to provide aid to the region.

Survivors of the first explosion were digging through the rubble about 10 a.m. Thursday when Brig. Gen. Saleh Mohammed Hassan, the provincial police commander, arrived to survey the 100 or so houses damaged in the blast.

A furious crowd thronged around Hassan and began to throw stones at him and American and Iraqi soldiers on the scene, in the Zenjeeli district of western Mosul, witnesses said. Hassan and other Iraqi police were heading for their cars when a man approached them and detonated his explosive vest, said Brig. Gen. Sayeed Ahmed Abdulla, a spokesman for the Nineveh police.

The back-to-back explosions were the latest blow to efforts to pacify Mosul, the third-largest city in Iraq. U.S. forces have recently launched major operations across northern Iraq to rout out al-Qaida in Iraq.

Iraqi military officials blamed both attacks on al-Qaida in Iraq and said the first explosion took place when Iraqi soldiers tried to enter a building that may have been a bombmaking factory.

Also Thursday

Long-term plan: The Bush administration sought to defuse congressional opposition to its plans to negotiate a long-term agreement with Iraq on the presence of U.S. forces, contending it would not tie the hands of the next president. Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman, said the agreement would not stipulate how many troops should stay, dictate operations or establish permanent bases in Iraq. Instead, the plan would be a "status of forces agreement" to outline the legal basis for the U.S. presence, Casey said.

Oil exports: Iraq's oil exports rose 9.2 percent last year, the Oil Ministry announced. The rise in 2007 exports reached an average of 1.6-million barrels per day - still short of the estimated 2.5-million barrels a day before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Courts: Army Sgt. Leonardo Trevino, accused of shooting a badly wounded and unarmed Iraqi insurgent in the stomach, then ordering a medic to suffocate him before fatally shooting him in the head, will be tried in military court, his attorney said.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.

[Last modified January 25, 2008, 00:18:26]