Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News

BAGHDAD, 22 April 2004 — Suicide attackers unleashed simultaneous car bombings against police buildings in Basra yesterday, striking rush-hour crowds and killing at least 68 people, including more than a dozen children heading to school. Iraqi leaders blamed Al-Qaeda terrorists.

The attacks, which wounded some 200 people, marked a revival of the terror threat amid the bloodshed of US battles with resistance fighters across the country since the beginning of the month. Bombers simultaneously detonated four cars packed with missiles and TNT just after 7 a.m. in front of three police stations — one of them next to Basra’s main street market — and a police academy. An hour later another car bomb went off outside the police academy, located in Zubair, a suburb of Basra.

In front of the Saudia police station, vehicles were shredded and charred in the blast, including two school buses carrying kindergartners and taking girls aged 10-15 to school. Dead children, burned beyond recognition, were pulled out of the wreckage. A body, black as carbon but apparently an adult, was taken away in the back of a pickup truck.

Police discovered two other car bombs before they were detonated and arrested three men in the vehicles, said Basra Gov. Wael Abdul-Latif, who blamed the attack on Al-Qaeda terrorists. He said 16 children and nine policemen were among the dead.

A reporter counted the bodies of 10 kindergartners and six middle-school girls at Basra’s Teaching Hospital, where the morgue was full and corpses were left in the halls outside. The attacks “showed once again that terrorists are willing to kill as many people as they can, indiscriminately,” said the top US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer. “They have a very warped view of the future of Iraq.”

The last major suicide attack also targeted Shiites: A series of suicide bombers who near simultaneously detonated explosives strapped to their bodies among thousands of pilgrims in Karbala and Baghdad on March 2. At least 181 people were killed.

US officials said they believed those attacks were planned by a Jordanian Al-Qaeda linked militant, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, who they say intends a campaign of spectacular attacks on Shiites in order to spark a civil war between Iraq’s Shiite majority and Sunni minority.

But since the start of April, attention has shifted to Iraq’s home-grown fighters, with US troops launching a major siege against the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah and a Shiite militia launching a revolt across the south. Those two fronts — plus a flare-up of violence around Baghdad and across Iraq — have tied down and stretched US forces in Iraq.

An agreement aimed at bringing peace to Fallujah, 50 kilometers (35 miles) west of Baghdad, met troubles only a day after its implementation began. Marines said Iraqis had yet to turn in any weapons, and a heavy battle broke out on the north side of the city, killing nine gunmen and wounding three Marines, the military said.

Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the army’s 1st Armored Division, suggested the bombings were timed to coincide with the relative quiet in violence.