Officials: 70 killed by insurgents in Iraq

04/20/2005

Bombs rock Baghdad

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN)—Iraqi officials made two grisly discoveries Wednesday, finding more than 50 bodies in the Tigris River and 20 soldiers shot to death west of the capital, officials said.

Iraq President Jalal Talabani said dozens of bodies have been found in the Tigris River south of Baghdad.

He said the bodies were people who had been held hostage earlier this week in Madain, a village south of Baghdad.

“More than 50 bodies have been brought out from the Tigris, and we have the full names of those who were killed and those criminals who committed these crimes,” Talabani said.

Iraqi security forces searched Madain early Sunday, conducting door-to-door searches for the hostages, Iraqi police sources said.

The sources said the hostages had included four to six Shiites who were in a mosque when insurgents attacked it Saturday.

Talabani said interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi will lead the investigation into the bodies found in the river.

In the western Iraqi town of Haditha, insurgents shot and killed 20 Iraqi soldiers Wednesday morning, a police official said.

The soldiers, dressed in civilian clothes, were abducted from a vehicle and taken to the Haditha soccer stadium where they were shot to death, the official said.

The soldiers were traveling to the al-Haklaniya police station just south of Haditha, the official said.

Baghdad bombings

A series of bombings have rocked the Baghdad region, killing an Iraqi child and an adult and wounding at least eight other people, police said.

This is the latest violence to plague the capital, which has been besieged by insurgent bombings in recent days.

The latest bombing—at about 12:45 p.m. Wednesday—targeted an Iraqi police patrol in the Abu al-Cheer neighborhood in the southern Baghdad. Three Iraqi civilians were wounded and two police cars were damaged, police said.

About 11:15 a.m., another bombing occurred outside of the Bilat al-Shouhada’ police station in Dora district in the southern part of Baghdad, Iraqi police said. Only the driver of the car bomb was killed and 15 cars were damaged, police said.

Just an hour earlier, a car bomb targeting a U.S. military convoy near the Baghdad airport exploded, killing two Iraqi civilians and wounding one U.S. soldier and at least four Iraqi civilians, police said.

A Tuesday night a suicide car bomb attack targeted a U.S. military convoy near an apartment complex in western Baghdad killed two U.S. soldiers. With the deaths, the number of U.S. troops to have died during the Iraq war stands at 1,562.

Four other soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter were injured.