Baghdad: At least 11 people were killed and over 60 wounded when two suicide car bombs went off at a village near the city of Tal Afar in Iraq’s northern province of Nineveh on Sunday.
Abdul-Aal al-Abbasi, an official in the Tal Afar local government, told Xinhua over telephone said that those killed included a school principal and a policeman.
“…More than 60 (people were) wounded and most of them were school children, in the two suicide car bombs near a school and a police station in the village of Qabat,” he said.
One suicide bomber blew up a truck loaded with explosives near a primary school in a majority-Shiite village outside the city of Tal Afar, about 400 km north of the Iraq’s capital Baghdad, Abbasi said.
The explosion damaged a part of the school building, and Iraqi security forces and rescue teams rushed to the scene and started removing the debris of the building looking for victims, Abbasi said.
Another car bomb went off near a police station in the same area, Abbasi said without giving further details.
Ambulances, police and civilian vehicles are evacuating the victims to medical centres in nearby Tal Afar city, he added.
Iraq is witnessing its worst eruption of violence in recent years, which raises fears that the country is sliding back to the full-blown civil conflict that peaked in 2006 and 2007, when monthly death toll sometimes exceeded 3,000.
The UN Assistance Mission for Iraq has said that almost 6,000 civilians were killed and over 14,000 others injured in Iraq from January to September this year.(IANS)
