Vehicle Explosion Blocks Major Highway, Buries Troops in Rubble

Jun 11, 07:35 AM

Current Headlines: By CHARLES J. HANLEY

By Charles J. Hanley

The Associated Press

MAHMOUDIYA, Iraq

With a thunderous rumble and cloud of dust and smoke, an apparent suicide vehicle bomb brought down a section of a highway bridge south of Baghdad on Sunday, wounding several U.S. soldiers guarding the crossing and blocking traffic on Iraq's main north-south artery.

There was no immediate U.S. Army confirmation on the number and severity of the casualties. An Iraqi civilian also was injured, said Donald Campbell of the private security Armor Group International , who helped in the rescue.

Also Sunday, a suicide truck bomber struck an Iraqi police office in Tikrit, killing at least 15 people and wounding 50, police said.

At the highway bridge, Campbell and others in a passing Armor Group convoy worked with a U.S. Army quick reaction force for 45 minutes to pull trapped men from the rubble, scrambling over the fallen concrete.

U.S. armored vehicles provided cover fire after the bombing, which occurred in the area dubbed the "triangle of death" for its frequent Sunni insurgent attacks.

The blast dropped one of two sections of the "Checkpoint 20" bridge crossing over the north-south expressway, six miles east of Mahmoudiya.

It appeared that a northbound suicide driver stopped and detonated his vehicle beside a support pillar, said Lt. Col. Garry Bush, an Army munitions officer who was in the convoy, which arrived two minutes after the blast.

A U.S. Army checkpoint and a tent structure, apparently a rest area, fell into the shattered concrete.

"When that size blast went off, everyone was in shock," said one of the first atop the rubble, Jackie Smith, 53, of Olathe, Kan., a former lieutenant colonel now working as a civilian Army munitions expert.

Soon the outpost sergeant was organizing a search for his missing men, Smith said. The Armor Group team climbed up with first-aid kits, stretchers and other aid.

With the Army's quick reaction force, they struggled to lift concrete shards off the men, pinned along the slope of what was once a roadway. At one point, a Bradley armored vehicle with a tow chain pulled a slab off a pinned victim to free him.

Then a shout went up, "Morphine! Morphine!" and one of the black- T-shirt-clad Britons administered painkiller to the freed man.

In Tikrit, a suicide truck bomber destroyed a building housing the highway police directorate in the Albu Ajil village on the eastern outskirts of Saddam Hussein's hometown, killing at least 15 people and wounding 50, police said.

The attacker detonated his explosives after smashing into a wall, flattening a small reception building and damaging the main two- story building 20 yards away, a police officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of security concerns. He said most of those killed and wounded were police.

And a U.S. helicopter dropped flares on a crowd in a square in eastern Baghdad, hours after clashes between American troops and Shiite militia that left at least five people dead.

The U.S. military on Sunday reported the deaths of three American soldiers. Among them were a U.S. airman killed in a roadside bombing in southern Iraq and two soldiers - one killed in Baghdad and another who died of injuries in Diyala province.

The deaths raised the number of U.S. soldiers who have died to at least 3,506 since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to a count by The Associated Press.

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