Violence continued in Iraq yesterday with a total of six people killed and dozens wounded in three separate attacks. The attacks came just 24 hours after 43 people died in the most violent day in Baghdad since US troops entered the city.
Five people were killed yesterday by a suicide attack in the town of Falluja when a car bomb exploded near a police station in the troubled town to the west of Baghdad.
Severely burnt and mangled bodies lay on the ground after a pick-up truck blew up 150 metres from the station, witnesses said. Another eight people were wounded.
Another American soldier was confirmed killed and six other troops wounded in a Baghdad rocket attack. The deputy mayor of Baghdad was also killed in a drive-by shooting on Sunday night. Officials in the US Coalition Provisional Authority said Mr Faris al-Assam was near his home in the capital when the killers struck.
A roadside bomb blast in the southern city of Basra yesterday wounded a soldier from the US-led occupying forces, an Iraqi contractor and one other contractor, the British military said.
The Iraqi contractor was very seriously wounded while the other three occupants of the vehicle suffered minor injuries, a British military spokesman said.
The attacks came as police and US soldiers began to clear away the rubble from Monday's suicide car bombings in Baghdad, which devastated the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross and three police stations.
At the ICRC headquarters yesterday, US soldiers and Iraqi police shifted through the debris removing body parts. The Red Cross said it might follow other groups in scaling back its presence in Iraq because of the security threat.
Beside the gaping crater left by the bomb that killed 12 people, a US soldier collected together the remains of a hand from one local resident and removed it in a plastic carton.
Ms Nada Doumani, spokeswoman for the ICRC said: "We're still trying to overcome the shock and horror of what has happened here. We have a duty to the Iraqi people to remain, but if that means the likelihood of more attacks then we'll pull out at once."
The ICRC, one of the few agencies that stayed in Iraq throughout the US attack on the country, has about 30 foreign staff and around 600 Iraqi employees in the country. Security concerns forced the organization to cut back from a maximum of 130 foreign staff earlier in the year.
The attack on the ICRC headquarters was the first of its kind on the Geneva-based organisation, whose mission is to assist war victims on all sides. "We thought people knew about our work. We didn't believe we were a target. We were wrong," an ICRC member said.
Few aid organisations appeared to be heeding Colin Powell's plea for them to stay in Iraq. Medecins Sans Frontieres said it would scale down its seven-member expatriate team.
Doctors of the World said it would remove three of its six doctors. A spokeswoman for Care, said it was reassessing the status of its eight foreign and 70 local staff in Iraq.