A suicide bomber blew himself up at a crowded army recruitment centre in Baghdad killing 59 people yesterday, officials said, as violence coinciding with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan raged across Iraq.
The attack, blamed on Al-Qaeda and the deadliest this year, wounded at least another 100 people and came a day after Iraq’s two main political parties suspended talks over the formation of a new government and as the US withdraws thousands of its soldiers from the country.
Britain and France led international condemnation of the attack, with Paris describing it as “cowardly” and London labelling it “unjustified and vicious”.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered a high-level probe into the bombing, which Baghdad security spokesman Major General Qassim Atta blamed on Al-Qaeda.
“The fingerprints of Al-Qaeda are very clear in this attack,” Major Atta told AFP. “You can see it in the timing, the circumstances, the target and the style of the attack – all the information indicates it was Al-Qaeda behind this.”
An official at Baghdad morgue put the death toll at 59, while a doctor at Medical City hospital, close to the scene of the attack, said they had received 125 wounded.
The bomber blew himself up around 7.30 a.m. (0430 GMT) at the centre, a former Ministry of Defence building that now houses a local security command, in the Baab al-Muatham neighbourhood in the heart of the capital.
An Interior Ministry official said the majority of the victims were prospective soldiers seeking to enlist on the last day of a week-long recruitment drive but that some troops who were protecting the compound were also hurt and killed.
A doctor at Medical City hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity, said several of the wounded remained in critical condition and added that most of the victims were “very young – less than 20 years old.”
Also yesterday, two separate bomb attacks against judges in Baghdad and the central city of Baquba left four of them wounded, security officials said.
The recruitment centre explosion was the bloodiest single attack here since December 8, when coordinated blasts in the capital killed 127 people, and recalls a spate of suicide bombings against army recruitment posts in 2006 and 2007, when Iraq’s insurgency was at its peak.