A bomb beside a fuel truck set off a huge fireball in which at least 17 people were killed in Baghdad this morning, as violence gripped Iraq in the wake of the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Thousands of US troops swooped on a heavily anti-American town north of Baghdad as President George W. Bush said Saddam, held by US forces at an undisclosed location, deserved to die.
Shortly after dawn, the bomb in the Bayya'a district of Baghdad caused a huge ball of fire that caught a minibus and several civilian cars packed with people heading to work, police said.
At least 17 people, mostly passengers, were killed and around 16 others badly burnt in the inferno, they said.
It was not immediately clear whether the bomb had been in the truck itself, or whether it had gone off at the roadside causing the truck carrying fuel to explode.
Roadside bombs are a favourite weapon of anti-American fighters who use them to attack US military patrols.
The violence was another blow to any hopes that the capture of Saddam last Saturday near his hometown of Tikrit, north of Baghdad, would ease guerrilla attacks.
In a continued crackdown on guerrillas, American troops raided a house in the town of Samarra and captured 73 suspected insurgents yesterday, including the leader of a guerrilla cell, the US army said.
It said early today that the offensive was stepped up overnight to isolate and eliminate former members of Saddam's regime and other cells fighting the US-led coalition.
The US 4th Infantry Division, based in Tikrit, was running Operation Ivy Blizzard in Samarra, along with Iraqi security forces, the army said.
