Truck bomber kills 20 in Baghdad
The road to security in Iraq is long
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Saturday, 24, Mar 2007 04:52
A suicide bomber has killed 20 people in Baghdad after driving a truck full of explosives into the reinforced gate of a police station in the Iraqi capital.
Police at the Doura station in a Sunni Muslim district of southern Baghdad civilians and their own officers are among the dead.
Twenty-three others were injured in the blast, which came several hours after mortars killed three people in a nearby Shia Muslim area.
As if further evidence was needed of the extent of sectarian violence afflicting Iraqis, ten others were killed in a suicide attack in north-western Talafar, while three separate suicide bombings on the Syrian border claimed 11 lives.
In addition, a bomber in Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, left eight people dead.
US and Iraqi troops are currently enforcing heightened security initiatives across Baghdad, with today's deaths follow two high-profile attacks earlier in the week.
On Thursday a speech by Ban Ki-moon on how stability was beginning to return to the troubled Middle Eastern country was interrupted by a mortar landing 50 yards from the Green Zone building he was delivering his address in with Nouri al-Maliki.
The UN secretary general and television cameras were both left shaken by the explosion, but neither he or the Iraqi prime minister was hurt.
And then yesterday one of Mr al-Maliki's two deputies was injured after the mosque he was praying in was hit by a double suicide bomb attack.
Sunni Muslim politician Salam al-Zaubai is in a stable condition after undergoing surgery in a US hospital in Baghdad's Green Zone for wounds caused by shrapnel.