Twenty-three people are now known to have died in a suicide bomb attack at a Baghdad restaurant just outside the Green Zone government compound today.
A further 29 were wounded after the bomber walked into the restaurant at lunchtime on a street protected by police checkpoints and lying a few hundred metres from one of the main public entrances to the fortified Green Zone.
The explosion killed seven police officers, while the injured included 16 police officers and the bodyguards of Iraqi Finance minister Ali Abdel-Amir Allawi, police Lt. Col. Talal Jumaa said. The minister was not in the restaurant.
The Iraqi parliament was in session inside the vast compound, which once housed the presidential palace of Saddam Hussein, on the west bank of the Tigris river.
The restaurant, one of several serving grilled meats and kebabs along a strip of shaded sidewalk, was popular with police and other visitors to the Green Zone. A lively place, it was known as “Ibn Zanbour”, “Son of the Wasp”.
A series of car bombings at entrances to the Green Zone in December led to security being tightened on the approach roads to the compound. A bomber approaching the restaurant on foot, however, would be less likely to be checked.
Near the scene of the attack is a main entrance for civilian employees working in the Green Zone, as well as for journalists and other visitors to the area, which also houses the US and British embassies.
In an earlier suicide car bomb attack on a police patrol in the Kadhimiya district of northwestern Baghdad, five people were killed and 22 wounded, police said.
Elsewhere, militants staged attacks that killed at least nine people, despite two joint US-Iraqi offensives - operations Spear and Dagger - that began earlier this week with about 1,000 US forces and Iraqi soldiers each.
Insurgents also exploded a water pipeline in the capital, and Mayor Alaa al-Timimi said the city of 5 million people would suffer a 24-hour water shortage.
Nearly 60 insurgents have been killed and 100 captured so far in the offensives, which are aimed at destroying militant networks near the Syrian border and north of Baghdad, the military said. Three Americans have been wounded.