Iraq: Suicide Bombing at Bank, Attacks on Police, More Bodies Found

From the Washington Post, "Suicide Bombing in Iraq Kills At Least 20"

BAGHDAD - A man wearing an explosive belt blew himself up Tuesday outside a bank in the northern city of Kirkuk, police said, killing at least 20 bystanders and wounding 83, many of them women and children, in the deadliest single suicide bombing in Iraq in more than a month.

In Kenaan, a town between Kirkuk and Baghdad, a suicide car bomber killed five Iraqi soldiers at a road checkpoint and a mortar attack left the town's police station in flames, the Associated Press reported.

And in restive Anbar province, west of Baghdad, police found 24 bodies dumped in two separate areas in Habbaniya.

Kirkuk's police chief, Maj. Gen. Torhan Yousif, said the bomber was carrying more than 100 pounds of explosives when he joined a line of people waiting in line at the government-run Rafidain Bank to pick up their paychecks. The explosion killed and wounded civilians, police, and employees of local political parties, as well as severely damaging the bank and surrounding shops.

"The street was full of blood of the wounded and killed, and all the shops closed because people were afraid of more attacks," Nawzad Omar, 50, said afterward at a local hospital...

A recent succession of grisly discoveries by Iraqi authorities continued on Monday when police discovered 17 bodies 80 miles west of Baghdad and another seven near Hit, about 95 miles northwest of the capital. None were immediately identified.

Four of the 17 dead found by Iraqi soldiers had been beheaded, according to Abdul Munim Ahmed, a physician at a hospital in nearby Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province.

In Hit, the head of the local hospital, Ahmed Jarrallah, said two of the seven bodies discovered there were women, and both had been beheaded. A statement posted at a mosque in Hit asserted that the seven had been killed by members of Ansar al-Sunna, one of the most violent insurgent groups in Iraq. The statement called the victims "traitors" who had "been helping the occupier fight the holy warriors" by working as private contractors who supplied cement...

Update from AP:

...Security forces captured a reported key member of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq terrorist group who is accused of building and selling cars used by bombers, the Iraqi government said Tuesday.

He was identified as Jassim Hazan Hamadi al-Bazi, also known as Abu Ahmed, and was arrested June 7, the government said. It added that he was part of an Al Qaeda cell run by a man identified as Hussayn Ibrahim...