By Lin Noueihed
Baghdad - A suicide car bombing has sown havoc in the heart of Baghdad, killing at least 16 people, five of them foreign contractors.
Two Britons, a Frenchman and an American were among the dead. The US military said 10 contractors had been wounded.
The five contractors killed were employees of a subsidiary of the US conglomerate General Electric or security contractors working with the company.
It was the second suicide bombing in the Iraqi capital in 24 hours, and coincided with a wave of assassinations aimed at the new interim government appointed to take over from the US-British occupation authorities on June 30.
Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said the morning rush-hour attack devastated a busy street and ripped the front off a building.
"The terrorists are trying to prevent the transfer of power and sovereignty on June 30," he told a news conference.
Hospital officials said at least eight other people, including two African workers, were killed and dozens were wounded, many of them with severe burns or limbs torn off by the blast near Tahrir (Liberation) Square.
In New York, a spokesperson for General Electric said three of the dead contractors were employees of a wholly owned GE subsidiary, Granite Services, and the other two were security staff contracted to the company's team in Iraq.
The US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) employs thousands of contractors from many nations. Some are involved in reconstruction projects and others are private security guards.
Two Iraqi policemen at the scene said the blast killed five people in one CPA vehicle that was reduced to a charred wreck.
A bomber in a red four-wheel-drive vehicle set off the explosion, hitting two other CPA vehicles, police said.
A wave of kidnappings has compounded security concerns for foreigners in Iraq. CNN television yesterday said two Turkish nationals had been taken hostage. No further details were available.
The British Foreign Office said two of those killed in the Baghdad bombing were Britons. A French diplomat in Baghdad said the coalition had told the embassy that one of the five foreign victims was French.
Crowds of shocked and angry Iraqis swarmed over the area, struggling to pull survivors from the building.
Dozens of people hammered on two of the CPA vehicles caught in the blast, dancing on their roofs and chanting "America is the enemy of God". They then set fire to their fuel tanks.
US tanks and other military vehicles escorted by soldiers on foot later sealed off the area with razor wire. Truckloads of American troops in riot gear arrived to control the crowds.
On Sunday, a suicide car bombing killed up to 12 Iraqis near a US-Iraqi base in Baghdad and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil servant and a university professor. A top Foreign Ministry official was assassinated the previous day.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell, acknowledging the difficulty of protecting Iraq's new leaders, pledged to do "everything we can to defeat this insurgency".
Last month, a suicide bombing killed Izzedin Salim, the head of Iraq's now-dissolved Governing Council, and another council member survived an ambush south of Baghdad.
Interim President Ghazi Yawar described the latest assassinations as "random killings" and said violence would diminish once Iraq had rebuilt its own security forces.
As the interim government reeled under the onslaught, British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon flew to the southern city of Basra on a surprise visit to British troops in the area.
Meanwhile the US military has moved more prisoners from Abu Ghraib jail, at the heart of a scandal over the abuse of prisoners by US forces, under a programme to reduce numbers there by June 30.
Witnesses said eight buses left the jail near Baghdad. The military had said 585 prisoners would be freed by yesterday.
One middle-aged man wept as he hugged two distraught women and a little girl who had come to meet him.
"They are oppressors. These are infidels and oppressors," he said of the US-led forces.
US military documents show an interrogation unit reported mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib in November 2003, months before the military said they that learned of prisoner abuses. - Reuters,
Published on the web by Star on June 15, 2004.
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