Second makeshift gas bomb kills 3 in Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Feb 22 (Reuters) Militants detonated a device in Baghdad that released toxic fumes, killing at least three people, in the second such attack with a makeshift ''chemical bomb'' in two days, police and officials said today.

The bomb exploded in Bayaa, in southwest Baghdad, yesterday. A police source put the death toll at three with 35 more hospitalised.

An Interior Ministry source said six were killed and 73 wounded, including many sickened by a gas thought to be chlorine.

''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 local hospital told Reuters Television.

On Tuesday, a bomb destroyed a truck carrying chlorine north of Baghdad, killing at least five people and spewing out fumes that left nearly 140 others sick, Iraqi police said.

Reuters SY DB1157