IRAQ WRAPUP 2-Second chlorine bomb may show new militant tactic

By Staff
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BAGHDAD, Feb 22 (Reuters) The US military said today a second bomb in two days using chlorine gas may have been a copycat attack amid concerns insurgents are broadening their range of weaponry to include crude chemical bombs.

US and Iraqi forces were on alert on Thursday as Iraq marked the anniversary of the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, an act that unleashed a wave of sectarian violence and pushed the country to the brink of all-out civil war.

A US military spokesman said the military would keep a close eye to see whether insurgents were developing new methods after Wednesday's bomb involving chlorine in Baghdad.

A police source put the death toll from the bomb at three with 35 more hospitalised. An Interior Ministry source said six were killed and 73 wounded, including many sickened by the gas.

''We were in the shops working when all of a sudden it exploded and we saw yellow fumes. Everybody was suffocating,'' a man at a hospital told Reuters TV after Wednesday's bomb.

On Tuesday, a truck rigged with explosives blew up north of Baghdad, killing at least five people and releasing a cloud of chlorine gas that left nearly 140 others sick, police said.

Chlorine gas was used as a weapon in World War One, but its use now in militant attacks in Iraq has particular resonance for Iraqis.

Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on Kurdish areas in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War.

Sectarian tension was fuelled on Thursday by accusations from a woman in the northern city of Tal Afar that members of the Shi'ite-dominated security forces raped her.

The allegations came two days after a 20-year-old Sunni woman in Baghdad accused police of gang-raping her, sparking a political furore that has laid bare the bitter sectarian divide between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs.

US TROOPS MONITOR CHLORINE USE US military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver said the U.S. military was watching Wednesday's new use of chlorine gas.

He said copycat attacks were frequent in such cases.

''It's something that as far as we can tell is relatively new, but it's not the first time they've used the concept of adding additional items to explosives to make them more lethal and injure more civilians and kill more people,'' Garver said.

''In terms of it being a trend, we'll obviously keep an eye on that,'' Garver said.

Exactly a year after militants entered the Golden Mosque in Samarra, setting off charges that destroyed the dome of the revered shrine, the U.S. military said its troops captured five suspected al Qaeda militants near Samarra today.

Garver declined to say if the operations in the Samarra area, which lies north of Baghdad, were linked to any specific intelligence on possible anniversary attacks.

The destruction of one of the four major Shi'ite shrines in Iraq triggered immediate reprisals and the spiral of bombings and death squad killings since then took the toll of civilian deaths in 2006 to some 34,000, according to UN figures.

US and Iraqi forces launched a major new security plan in Baghdad last week aimed at stemming the sectarian bloodshed.

The presence of thousands more troops on the streets has reduced the number of bodies found shot and tortured every day, but car bombs remain a problem, a US general said this week.

REUTERS SAM PM2111

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