Car Bomb at Baghdad Hotel Leaves at Least 27 Dead

March 18, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS

AGHDAD, Iraq, March 17 — A huge car bomb destroyed the five-story Mount Lebanon Hotel in central Baghdad on Wednesday evening, tearing the facade off the building and sending residents tumbling into the street.

At least 27 people were killed and 41 wounded.

The explosion reduced an apartment block across the road to a tangle of steel, masonry and shattered furniture, and it left an inferno of blazing cars and buildings that lighted the night sky for hours.

Iraqi rescue teams clawed at the rubble with hands and shovels deep into the night, but no survivors were pulled clear after the first frenzied hours. At least some victims appeared to be foreigners, mainly from Arab countries, including, the police said, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

The bombing was among the worst to be carried out in Iraq during the American occupation. It came less than 36 hours before the anniversary of the first American bombing raid on Baghdad at dawn on March 19 last year, a raid that signaled the start of the war to topple Saddam Hussein.

Survivors of Wednesday's bombing said Americans and Britons and other Europeans were among those staying at the hotel, which has traditionally attracted visiting Arab business people and, among Westerners, people on modest budgets working for relief agencies. But in the pandemonium at the scene and at neighboring hospitals in the hours after the blast, no clear picture emerged about the nationalities of the non-Iraqis who were killed or injured.

American officers who had cautioned that pro-Hussein insurgents and militant Islamic terrorists might try to mark the anniversary of the start of the war with a new round of attacks were quick to point a finger at a Jordanian-born terrorist leader, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.

Col. Ralph Baker, commander of the Second Brigade, First Armored Division, who led American troops who raced to the scene in armored Humvees, said the blast appeared to have been caused by a car bomb with at least 1,000 pounds of plastic explosives that had been combined with a core of wired-together artillery shells. He said attackers here had used the formula frequently to cause a maximum blast and a widespread curtain of deadly shrapnel.

[The Associated Press reported Thursday that at least two American soldiers were killed and six wounded in Balad, near Baghdad, in a mortar attack on the logistics base there on Wednesday. The military did not identify the soldiers involved.]

Doctors at four Baghdad hospitals visited by reporters said the death toll could rise because of burn and crush injuries among survivors, some of whom lay groaning in poorly equipped emergency rooms while doctors attended more urgent cases.

Hospital entranceways and wards were a bedlam of wailing relatives, agitated Iraqi policemen with automatic rifles pushing back crowds, and gurneys and stretchers being rushed past, carrying bodies under bloodied blankets and black shrouds.

The attack ranked, in numbers of dead, with the bombings last year of the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which killed a total of almost 40 people. The worst single attack in the capital, two weeks ago, killed more than 80 people when three suicide bombers detonated themselves at a religious festival in Baghdad, simultaneously with similar attacks in nearby Karbala, which killed another 120 people.

Colonel Baker told reporters that the blast was "similar to that carried out in the past by Ansar al-Islam and the Zarqawi network." No specific evidence was offered implicating Mr. Zarqawi.

American intelligence has linked Mr. Zarqawi to Ansar al-Islam, a group linked to Al Qaeda. Last month American intelligence agencies named him as the author of an intercepted message urging Qaeda leaders to support efforts by Islamic militants to provoke a civil war among Shiite and Sunni Muslims here, in hope of blocking plans for a Western-style democracy.

A $10 million American bounty has been placed on Mr. Zarqawi's head as the prime suspect in devastating bombings across Iraq in the past few months, including the United Nations and Red Cross attacks. American commanders, dismissing reports that Mr. Zarqawi has fled to Iran, said recently that they believed he was still in Iraq and active in planning new attacks.

Many of the wounded here Wednesday had long waits for attention in the ill-lighted hospitals, which have begun — with American financing — to recover from years of neglect and from the looting and sabotage that followed the American capture of Baghdad. But the hospitals still lack much in the way of basic equipment and medicines. Iraqi doctors said many of the most critically injured had suffered head injuries, and would be operated on overnight.

At the bombing scene, in Karada, a busy commercial district, a gaping crater marked the spot where the bomb had detonated. Iraqi police officers said the bomb might have been carried in an orange-painted car, left a tangled wreck, that was thrown 150 feet clear.

American officials said later that the crater's position, in the center of the narrow street, combined with what they described as the hotel's lack of strategic significance, was read by American investigators as a sign that the bomb might have been detonated accidentally while en route to another target.

For the Americans, the bombing marked an inauspicious start to a new military offensive in Baghdad.. Hours before the blast, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy operations director for the American command, said at a news briefing that in the new phase of the counteroffensive, the strikes, based on new intelligence, would give "a clear warning to the enemies of the Iraqi people," meaning the terrorists, that theirs was ultimately a doomed cause.

With no statement claiming responsibility for the blast, the motives were unknown. But the timing, close to the anniversary of the American invasion, and on the night marked for the new offensive, suggested that the attack might have been intended to taunt the Americans.

As well, by striking at another Iraqi target, the attackers might have been seeking to deepen the sense among Iraqis that they have substituted years of repression and fear under Mr. Hussein for a new era of fear, this time of terrorists, and that the American occupiers, who came as self-proclaimed liberators, are now at the root of Iraq's woes.

In any case, the grim tableau at the bomb scene stood as a ghastly anniversary marker. The blast, throwing first a blue flash and then a spreading cloud of smoke and fire above the rooftops, took place about three-quarters of a mile from the Palestine and Sheraton hotels, which are heavily guarded by bomb-proofed blast walls and American tanks and are the headquarters for many Western news organizations.

Arriving at the scene within minutes, reporters who evaded a cordon of volatile Iraqi policemen waving guns at the gathering crowd saw black-silhouetted rescue workers combing through the burning wreckage. From ambulances arriving helter-skelter, loudspeakers boomed out a mournful appeal for people to concentrate on survivors, not the limp and broken bodies of the dead.

Colonel Baker, the American commander, watched American soldiers who had been on standby earlier in the evening for strikes against the terrorists working, instead, to save terrorism's latest victims.

But as it became clearer that no more survivors were likely to be found, the Americans pulled back and left the television cameras to broadcast live images across the world of Iraqi police and firefighters doing the work themselves.

The mood among Iraqis varied widely, reflecting the deeper splits here between those who credit the Americans as liberators and others who regard them as a new evil. Qahcan Shukur, owner of a furniture factory, was across the road when the explosion detonated, and was hit by shards of flying glass. He turned his wrath on the Americans.

"Why don't Americans maintain security?" he said. "All of this technology they have, and they cannot prevent these attacks? I don't believe it."

A block away, another group took a different view. After watching a weeping man rushing toward an ambulance, cradling the limp body of his small daughter, Zaki Mohammad, 41, an electrical engineer, halted a reporter and asked that a message be passed to L. Paul Bremer III, chief of the American occupation authority. "Tell Bremer to hang the people responsible for this in a park in the center of Baghdad," he cried. "The American policy here is tolerance, tolerance, tolerance, soft, soft, soft. This is not the way. The way is execution."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company