From Deseret News archives:
Iraqi Christians targeted
Car bombs explode near 5 churches; at least 11 people killed
In Baghdad, at least 11 people, including two children, were killed in the explosions timed to coincide with Sunday evening Mass, and at least 20 people were injured, witnesses and hospital officials said. One person died in the Mosul attack, and seven people were injured, according to a U.S. military report.
At least one church, in a lively Christian enclave in the Karrada neighborhood of downtown Baghdad, was struck as the priest was giving Communion. Next door, a Muslim family of five was killed by the blast, which was powerful enough to rip a row of bricks from the building's top floor and shatter the windows inside a courtyard well down the block. A hospital official said a Muslim passer-by also was killed in one of the blasts.
"It is a crime," Monsignor Raphael Kutemi said in front of the rectory of the Syrian Catholic church, Notre Dame of Deliverance. "It is Sunday, and we were in prayer."
The bombings Sunday seemed to mark another turning point in the already terrifying violence that has wracked Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion last year.
A few minutes before the Syrian Catholic church was struck, another car bomb exploded in front of the nearby Armenian church as Mass was under way. And inside a seminary compound in the south Baghdad neighborhood of Doura, two cars loaded with explosives blew up. A fourth explosion was set off across town in an enclave called New Baghdad when a car carrying explosives crashed into the car in front of it and blew up yards from a Catholic church but in front of a mosque.
About the same time Sunday evening, in Mosul, about 220 miles north of Baghdad, parishioners were coming out of a Catholic church Mass when a car bomb detonated. A U.S. military report said the blast was caused by a bomb in a four-door Toyota Supra.
Earlier on Sunday, a suicide car bomber raced to a police station in Mosul and blew up his vehicle, killing at least five and wounding 53, U.S. military officials said. In Baghdad early in the morning, another car bomb killed three and injured three others.
Also Sunday, 128 Iraqis held in Abu Ghraib's detention camp rode past the gates of the prison compound to freedom waving strips of cloths and whistling as they leaned out bus windows
The men were held at Camp Redemption for at least three months each while their cases were evaluated and processed by American and Iraqi authorities, the U.S. military said.
Abu Ghraib — site of the U.S. military's prisoner abuse scandal — is a compound that includes a cell block housing Iraqi convicts and a camp holding accused insurgents.
The abuse allegations included prisoners saying they were beaten, forced to stand naked and threatened with military dogs. Photos of apparent abuse began emerging in international media several months ago.
Contributing: Associated Press
