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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Bomb near Baghdad wedding kills 18

Los Angeles Times The Spokesman-Review

BAGHDAD – Eighteen people died as a car bomb blew up outside a photo shop here as members of a wedding party waited Thursday night for the newlyweds to get their pictures taken.

The car bomb ripped through a street in Abu Dsheir, a Shiite district that adjoins the mainly Sunni neighborhood of Dora in southern Baghdad, as family and friends celebrated the wedding. Police said most of the 18 dead and 29 wounded were women and children who had been waiting for the bride and groom outside the picture studio near a restaurant.

“A massive blast destroyed the parked cars, severely damaged the restaurant and killed so many women and children,” said Mazin Ali, a street vendor who saw the blast. The newlyweds were stuck inside the studio for half an hour. “Instead of a wedding, it turned into a funeral,” Ali said.

In southern Baghdad, a bomb killed two U.S. soldiers and raised the U.S. military’s death toll in Iraq to 3,590, according to the Web site icasualties.org, which tracks deaths in Iraq. The U.S. military identified the bomb as an explosive-formed projectile, or EFP, which can puncture the armored plating on Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles.

American commanders and diplomats have accused Iran of providing these lethal weapons for use by Iraqi Shiite militants against U.S. soldiers. Earlier this week, U.S. commanders also charged that Iran’s elite Al Quds force and surrogates in the armed Shiite Lebanese group Hezbollah were training Iraqi fighters, culled from offshoots of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia, to battle the Americans.