HOW LOW CAN THESE ASSHOLES GO??

Children and patients die in hospital suicide blast

Baghdad(Filed: 25/11/2005)

A suicide car bomber killed dozens of people in an Iraqi town yesterday when he rammed his vehicle into American and Iraqi soldiers as they handed out toys and sweets to children outside a hospital.

But instead of inflicting mass casualties among the soldiers, the bomber's victims were mostly children, medics and patients, killed when the brunt of the blast was taken by the hospital's emergency room, which was wrecked by the explosion.

The suicide bomber's victims were mainly young children.

The attack in Mahmoudiyah, south of Baghdad, claimed at least 30 lives and was followed by a second blast last night in a shopping district in Hilla, also south of the Iraqi capital, where up to 11 people were reported to have died.

Six American soldiers were also reported to have been killed in attacks elsewhere in Iraq since Wednesday.

The American military said that four of its servicemen were lightly injured in the Mahmoudiyah attack. Hospital officials said that seven Iraqi policemen and three soldiers were among the dead.

But the bulk of the casualties were children at the gates of the hospital and civilians inside the emergency room.

"The bomber was parked in a nearby garage, and drove at the Americans when he saw them going into the hospital," said a hospital security guard. "But he missed them, and hit children, women, men and old people."

A doctor and five other medical staff were among the civilian dead. Many of the dozens of wounded were transferred to Baghdad for treatment.

Mahmoudiyah is one of a belt of towns with mixed Sunni and Shia Muslim populations around the southern periphery of Baghdad that have been riven by sectarian tensions in recent months.
In the nearby town of Yusufieh the bodies of two young men and two young women were found yesterday morning. They had apparently been tortured and strangled in killings that appeared to have sectarian overtones.

Further south, another car bomb exploded at dusk in Hilla, a city that came to prominence because it was the scene of a massive suicide bombing that killed 125 people.

Laith Kubba, an Iraqi government spokesman, predicted that the violence would escalate as the Dec 15 elections approached. He also said that Iraqi troops had discovered a car packed with booby-trapped toys to the west of Baghdad.

An American military statement later clarified that a man had been arrested after a single grenade had been found hidden inside a teddy bear.

In a development that offered a glimmer of hope, four insurgent groups were reported to be considering entering talks with the Iraqi government.

American and Iraqi officials are reported to believe that their best chance for a negotiated - settlement of the insurgency involves driving a wedge between religious extremists and groups led by former members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, who are ultimately more interested in power than in fighting.