Arab News Staff Writer

JEDDAH/BAGHDAD, 5 March 2004 — Saudi Arabia yesterday condemned the deadly attacks in Karbala and Baghdad and wished the injured a speedy recovery.

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia condemns the bloody events that occurred in Baghdad and Karbala and claimed innocent lives among the brotherly Iraqi people,” said a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency.

The statement said the Kingdom prayed to God to bless the martyrs and offered condolences to their families.

Suicide attacks in the two cities on Tuesday killed at least 182 people and injured hundreds.

Violence continued yesterday. A rocket slammed into a Baghdad street near a telephone exchange, killing at least three people. On Wednesday, a bomb exploded in another telephone exchange in Baghdad, sparking fears that guerrillas were targeting Iraq’s communications system in a new form of sabotage. The country’s energy infrastructure has frequently been attacked.

Police at the scene of yesterday’s attack said the rocket had skidded along the ground after the initial impact, hitting a car and killing its occupants. A large crowd of Iraqis stood around the mangled remains of the car.

“Three were killed and two were wounded,” policeman Luay Majeed said.

Some of the crowd that gathered after the attack shouted anti-US slogans, chanting: “America is the enemy of God.”

American soldiers and Iraqi police, meanwhile, arrested a militant suspected of overseeing an extremist, along with 13 followers. Sami Ahmed, a former Iraqi intelligence service officer under Saddam Hussein, was captured late Wednesday, said Maj. Josslyn Aberle of the Tikrit-based 4th Infantry Division, adding that he and the 13 other Iraqis were arrested near Baqouba, a hotbed of anti-coalition activity within the Sunni Triangle. Five Iraqi police were wounded in separate attacks in northern Iraq. Insurgents also fired a rocket-propelled grenade at US soldiers guarding a building where US officials were meeting with city council members in the city of Fallujah yesterday, witnesses and police said. The Americans arrested one Iraqi after storming a building from where the insurgents were firing, the witnesses said.

No group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but the top US commander in the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, said Wednesday that there was evidence that Al-Qaeda-linked Jordanian militant Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi was behind the bombings.

An insurgent group in Fallujah, however, circulated a statement signed by the “Leadership of the Allahu Akbar Mujahedeen” claiming that Zarqawi was killed in northern Iraq “during the American bombing there.”

— Additional input from agencies