Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News Staff

BAGHDAD, 1 January 2004 — A suspected suicide bombing devastated a Baghdad restaurant crowded with New Year revelers yesterday, killing at least five people, Iraqi police said.

Journalists at the scene said the front of the Nabil restaurant in Baghdad’s Arasat district had been destroyed and that the building was in flames.

At least 30 people were inside when the blast occurred, witnesses said.

US helicopters circled overhead and ambulances raced to the scene as US troops and Iraqi rescuers clawed through rubble looking for survivors. Wrecked cars were scattered across the road.

US-backed security forces had increased patrols in the Iraqi capital due to fears that guerrillas would choose the New Year period to launch new attacks on US troops and Iraqis working with the US-led administration in Baghdad.

The blast occurred hours after at least five Iraqis were killed and more than 20 wounded when gunfire erupted during a demonstration in Iraq’s northern city of Kirkuk. Several thousand Arab and Turkmen protesters marched on the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two main Kurdish factions, and surrounded the building, chanting “No to federalism, Kirkuk is Iraqi”.

Kirkuk’s chief of police said two people were killed in a burst of gunfire. Doctors said three more people died later and at least 20 were wounded.

Several wounded said they had been shot at by PUK peshmerga fighters. But Jalal Jawhar, head of the PUK office in Kirkuk, said Turkmen protesters opened fire on the PUK offices, wounding three members of Kirkuk’s largely Kurdish police.

In the past four days, two US soldiers have been killed in separate roadside bomb blasts, raising to 327 the number of US troops killed in action since the war was launched in March.

In the latest tragedy, an Iraqi child died when a parked car exploded in central Baghdad as a US military convoy drove by, said Jassem Jabbar of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. Five US soldiers and three members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps were also hurt.