Eyewitnesses said the death toll could raise much higher

Additional Reporting By Subhy Haddad, IOL Correspondent 

Baghdad, October 9 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – At least 10 Iraqi policemen were killed and several others wounded in a fresh car bomb attack on a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad on Thursday, October 9, a police officer told  IslamOnline.net, as a Spanish intelligence officer was also slain in the Iraqi capital.

“The bomber broke into the garage of the police center, neighboring Al-Mohsen Shiite Muslim mosque in the city, blasting the car and destroying part of the police center,” said the officer, who gave his name as Hatem.

U.S. military spokesman Captain Sean Kirley put the number of deaths at nine, including three policemen, five civilians and the bomber.

But eyewitnesses told IOL on the scene that the number of casualties could raise to a much larger one, because dozens of policemen and civilians were present at the police center during the attack.

A large number of demonstrators, belonging to the Muslim-Shiite inhabitants of the city, took to the streets and began to stone the U.S. occupation forces who rushed to the area minutes after the time of the explosion, said the eyewitnesses.

U.S. troops deployed three dozen U.S. armored personnel carriers and set up barbed wire around the police station and the charred wreckage of the Oldsmobile used in the attack.

Al-Sadr city, named after Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer Al-Sadr who was assassinated by the intelligence of the former regime of deposed President Saddam Hussein, inhabits about 2.5 million Shiite Muslims who have clashed with the U.S. troops occupying Baghdad since the end of the U.S.-British invasion in April 2003.

Kirley described the bomb used in the Thursday blast as an "improvised explosive device", a way commonly used in attacks on U.S. troops in occupied Iraq.

Although police officers are drawn from the local population, those opposed to the U.S. military occupation accuse them of being collaborators and have been the target of a series of attacks since the U.S.-led forces took control of the country, the BBC NewsOnline said.

An Iraqi policeman was killed on Wednesday, October 8, and another badly wounded when unknown gunmen fired a rocket-propelled grenade at their checkpoint in the northern city of Kirkuk, Iraqi police said.

There are no claims of responsibility for the Thursday blast, which came one day after U.S. forces detained 112 Iraqis.

The raid in Al-Qaim, near the Syrian border, "yielded 112 detainees, including a major general in the former Iraqi army air defense branch," the U.S. military said in a statement.

The detention campaigns, which also include house-to-house searches, have caused furor among ordinary Iraqis seeking an end to occupation of their oil-rich country and return of sovereignty back to the Iraqis.

Fresh Casualty 

In the meanwhile, a Spanish Embassy diplomat was killed in an armed attack on a Spanish Embassy diplomat at his residence in the western Baghdad district of Al-Mansour.

A group of armed men opened fire on the intelligence officer who was instantly killed, eyewitnesses told IOL.

Spanish Foreign Ministry named the officer as Antonio Bernal Gomez, and Spanish media reports said the diplomat had been posted in Iraq since the start of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

No information was available about the motives for the shooting.

Some 1,250 Spanish soldiers, whose country was a staunch supporter of the U.S-British invasion, have arrived in Iraq in September 2003 to contribute in the U.S.-led occupation forces who took control with the British forces of Iraq after the end of the invasion in April.

Bernal Gomez was the second Spanish diplomat to die violently in Iraq since the end of major combat operations in the country in early May.

On August 19, Manuel Martin Oar, a naval officer seconded to the United Nations, was one of 23 people killed in a bomb attack on the U.N.'s headquarters in the Iraqi capital.

The Baghdad correspondent of the daily Spanish newspaper El Pais, interviewed on the private radio station Cadena Ser, said Bernal Gomez was cut down by machine-gun fire as he left his residence.