Many Killed in Kirkuk Bomb Attack as Oil Pipeline Attacked in Southern Iraq

23/02/2004| IslamWeb

A vehicle bomb detonated outside an Iraqi police station in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing and wounding dozens of people, police said. The morning blast heavily damaged the Rahimawa police station in the city and destroyed nearby cars. Kirkuk's police chief, Torhan Abdul Rahman Yousef, said dozens of people were killed and wounded. He did not immediately have precise figures. Ambulances rushed to the scene, and police cordoned off the area, refusing to talk to reporters. **Oil Pipeline Attacked in Southern Iraq*** An oil pipeline was sabotaged in southern Iraq while deadly violence flared in the north, as the war-torn country awaited the release Monday of the UN's findings on the best way forward. A series of explosions were heard in the vicinity of Baghdad airport late Sunday but the cause was not immediately known, said a US airforce spokeswoman at the facility used as a military base. In the first attack of its kind in the south, an oil pipeline was targeted near Karbala, 110 kilometres from Baghdad, an official Iraqi source said. "An explosion damaged the pipeline and we don't know who the saboteurs are," said local Karbala official Hamid Salah al-Shebib. The blast on the Kirkuk-Baghdad-Basra pipeline set off a fire around the site of the attack, and thick black smoke could be seen billowing from kilometres (miles) around. Saboteurs have frequently targeted oil pipelines in oil-rich northern Iraq, where a gunbattle on Saturday night left one Iraqi dead and another seriously wounded when they attacked the home of a police chief, a police officer said. An Iraqi civilian was also killed Sunday morning in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul by a makeshift bomb planted beside a road used by military convoys. And police said two bodyguards were wounded when unidentified gunmen opened fire in the city, while in Baghdad three Iraqi policemen were wounded in a bomb blast. **PHOTO CAPTION*** US forces patrol the streets of Baghdad, Iraq in their humvees amid the first sandstorm of the year which shrouded the capital in a yellow haze Sunday Feb. 15, 2004. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)