By Evan Osnos and Tom Hundley, The Chicago Tribune
MOSUL, Iraq -- A car bomb ripped through a police station in this northern Iraqi city yesterday, killing at least nine people and wounding 48. Near Kirkuk, also in the north, an attack on a US convoy killed three US soldiers.
The car bomb threw body parts across four lanes of traffic. Wounded Iraqi officers stumbled down the block, leaving a trail of bloody footprints to a small pediatric hospital that was rapidly overwhelmed by the wounded. The blast appeared to have been timed for the moment when the busy police station was sure to be most full: payday on the eve of the feast of Eid al-Adha, marked by the ritual slaughtering of a lamb.
“They just started coming in the door,” said Dr. Ghait Al-Sebawi of Ibn Itheer Pediatric and Maternity Hospital, whose hands and coat were covered in blood. “This is the first time we have anything like this. We did what we can.”
Orange-and-white ambulances from around the city screamed up to the front door of Ibn Itheer, as wounded officers -- bandaged, dazed, some weeping -- were carried out of the building and transferred to other hospitals.
Located on a busy boulevard, the police station had been hit with gunfire repeatedly in recent months, according to police and US soldiers at the scene. Tall concrete protective barriers were erected three days before the blast, but witnesses said the bomber -- described as a lone suicide attacker -- approached the building from the side, which allowed access inside the protective barriers. The explosion hurled the charred wreck of a car onto the entryway of the police station, left the building in flames, and toppled several sections of the concrete barrier, crushing parked cars beneath it.
“I was just in that office a few hours ago,” said Army Lieutenant Larry Done of the Second Battalion, Third Infantry, gazing at the ruined station. “We were talking about how we were going to identify the car that has been shooting at them, and then this happened.”
In the blast near Kirkuk, a convoy from the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division was passing about 25 miles southwest of the city when it was rocked by a roadside explosion, a spokesman said.
The deaths brought to 522 the number of US soldiers killed since coalition forces invaded in March.
In Baghdad, Adnan Pachachi, whose term as president of the Iraqi Governing Council ended yesterday, announced a new law creating a public integrity commission that will serve as an anticorruption watchdog for Iraq’s transitional government.
The commission, which will have broad powers to audit and investigate government ministries, is supposed to foster a “culture of transparency and honesty” in a society where bribery and influence-peddling are rife. It would be the first of its kind in the region.
As billions of dollars in reconstruction funds are about to begin pouring into Iraq, a senior official with the US-led occupation authority said the new law gives Iraq a “world-class” tool that would help its fledgling government “root out corruption and prevent corruption.”
He acknowledged, however, that Iraq has few trained auditors or financial investigators. Another senior official noted that all of the $18.6 billion that the US government has earmarked for Iraqi reconstruction would be subject to audit by US authorities.
It is unclear what authority, if any, the integrity commission would have to investigate foreign businesses and their employees for corruption, nor is it clear whether the commission will survive beyond the transitional phase of the new government.
In a related matter, Pachachi said the Governing Council’s legal committee would look into allegations that Saddam Hussein’s government bought the support of various foreign leaders by giving them oil credits that could be traded on the open market, in violation of the UN embargo.
The list of recipients, published in a local newspaper, includes officials in the office of President Vladimir Putin of Russia; a French businessman close to President Jacques Chirac; the Russian ambassador to Baghdad; and British parliamentarian George Galloway, an ardent supporter of the previous Iraqi regime. Galloway and many of the others on the list deny receiving the credits.
“We have yet to consider this in detail, but obviously this is a very serious matter that deserves our close attention,” Pachachi said.