Iraq top cop killed in suicide blast

A suicide bomber in police uniform killed a top police official in the northern Iraqi...

A suicide bomber in police uniform killed a top police official in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Thursday as he toured the site of an explosion that killed 40 people and wounded 220 a day earlier, officials said.

Rescuers were sifting through the rubble of Wednesday’s blast for survivors when the attacker blew up beside the Nineveh province police director, Brigadier-General Salih Mohammed Hasan Atiya al-Jubouri, US military and Iraqi officials said.

They said the bomber walked up to Jubouri as he toured the site of Wednesday’s blast — which left a crater as deep as a multi-storey building — and detonated an explosive-packed vest. Jubouri died of his wounds while being rushed to hospital.

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Iraqi police had earlier incorrectly identified the official killed as Brigadier-General Salih Mohammed Hasan, police chief in the Nineveh provincial capital Mosul.

The US military said two Iraqi police were also killed in Thursday’s blast. Police said an Iraqi journalist working for the Chinese state news agency Xinhua was among five wounded, though no more information was immediately available.

The US military said a US soldier was also wounded.

The explosion on Wednesday, in an unoccupied, three-storey house used by militants to store weapons and tonnes of explosives, destroyed or badly damaged 35 homes nearby. The US military accused the al-Qaeda of storing the cache in the building.

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Pictures showed stunned onlookers standing on the lip of the crater. Rescuers clambered over twisted metal and crumbled houses in search of survivors and bodies.

US commanders have identified Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, as al-Qaeda’s last major urban stronghold in Iraq after its fighters were driven out of western Anbar province and from around Baghdad during security crackdowns last year.