'Syrian' Bomber Caught Alive in Baghdad, U.S. Says


27 October, 2003
Reuters

BAGHDAD - A U.S. general said the one attacker captured in the bombings that killed 34 Monday had a Syrian passport, fueling suspicions that foreign fighters were behind a rising tide of violence.
Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling of the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division said police shot and wounded the man when he got out of a car and tried to hurl a grenade at a Baghdad police station. The car carried three mortar rounds and was packed with TNT, he said. "He's a foreign fighter. He had a Syrian passport and the policemen claim that as he was shot and fell that he said he was Syrian," Hertling told a news conference. Iraqi Deputy Interior Minister Ahmad Ibrahim told the news conference the wounded attacker was now unconscious in hospital. Hertling said suicide attacks were not typical of supporters of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, who have been blamed by the U.S. military for most of guerrilla attacks on its troops and other targets in postwar Iraq.

"There are indicators that certainly these attacks have a mode of operation of foreign fighters," Hertling said, adding that possible foreign links among the attackers would be investigated in the days to come.

Thirty-four people were killed, including eight police officers, in the suicide attacks on three other police stations and the Red Cross headquarters, Ibrahim said. Another 224 people were wounded, 65 of them police.

One of the bombers, driving an Iraqi police car and wearing a police uniform, was admitted to a police compound before blowing himself and the station up, Hertling said.

He described the attacks as coordinated but said the coordination was not very sophisticated, extending no further than a decision by the various attackers to set off their bombs between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m.

"That's not professional, it's actually somewhat amateurish," Hertling said.

There was no indication that Monday's bombings were related to a Sunday rocket attack on a fortified Baghdad hotel where U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz was staying, Hertling said. A U.S. soldier was killed and 17 people were wounded in that attack, but Wolfowitz was unhurt.