Iraqi teen, 15, sent for suicide attack

Baqouba (Iraq), Aug. 25: The police in the Iraqi city of Baqouba detained a 15-year-old girl wearing an explosives vest who later confessed her mother was also planning to carry out a suicide attack.

Acting provincial police chief Major General Abdel Karim Khalaf said officers saw a woman acting suspiciously on Sunday and ordered her to stop. When she refused to comply, a policeman drew his gun on her while another handcuffed her. A bomb squad was then called and found she was wearing an explosives vest which was later defused.

Mr Khalaf said the bomber confessed that her mother was also preparing to carry out a suicide attack after her death. The police then went to Qatun, a town west of Baqouba, and found her 45-year-old mother with another explosives vest, Mr Khalaf said.

She was arrested along with a relative who was used to bring the vests, while her husband, the planner of the attacks, remains at large, Mr Khalaf said. Meanwhile, The death toll from a suicide bombing at a banquet attended by the police and members of an anti-Qaeda group west of Baghdad has risen to 30, a medic said on Monday.

Another 42 people were wounded in Sunday evening’s attack in Al-Zaidan village in Abu Ghraib district, the doctor from the public hospital in nearby Fallujah said.

The suicide bomber blew up his explosives-laden vest as police sat down to dinner with the anti-Qaeda group in the home of one of its commanders, Aziz Moklif Ghatha al-Zubai.

—AFP