In brief: Truck bomb kills at least 12

A truck rigged with TNT and chlorine exploded in the capital of Anbar province Friday, the latest in a spate of chemically laced bombings in the restive area west of Baghdad, police said.

Authorities said the truck’s driver appeared to be targeting a police checkpoint in Ramadi but instead slammed the vehicle into an apartment complex.

The U.S. military said in a statement that 12 people were killed and 43 wounded. Iraqi police said 27 people were killed and 30 wounded.

The attack was at least the sixth involving chlorine since the end of January in Anbar, a hub of the Sunni insurgency. Friday’s blast was the deadliest yet.

LONDON

Brits say confession coerced

British sailors and marines freed by Iran said Friday they were blindfolded, isolated in cold stone cells and tricked into fearing execution while being coerced into falsely saying they had entered Iranian waters.

They said there was no doubt the 15 crew members were in Iraq’s territorial waters when they were seized by heavily armed boats of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Appearing a day after being flown home to reunions with their families, the eight sailors and seven marines reported undergoing constant psychological pressure and being threatened with seven years in prison if they did not say they intruded into Iranian waters.

They said their captors also lined them up against a wall one night to the ominous sound of weapons cocking behind their heads.

“At some points I did have fears that we would not survive,” Operator Maintainer Arthur Batchelor, 20, the youngest sailor among the captives, told the Associated Press.

ACAPULCO, Mexico

TV reporter shot near plaza

The Acapulco correspondent for Mexico’s top television news network was shot to death late Friday.

Televisa’s Amado Ramirez was shot by two gunmen who were waiting for him at his car after his radio show, state security official Felipe Flores said. He died on the steps of the nearby Hotel California as he tried to escape.

The shooting happened on the outskirts of Acapulco’s busy central plaza, which was packed at the time with tourists and hundreds of people attending a Good Friday Mass at the resort’s cathedral. No one else was injured.

The gunmen escaped, and the motive for the killing was not immediately clear.

Ramirez had covered Acapulco for Televisa for more than a dozen years.

From wire reports