Twin bombs kill 27 at Iraq police station

Scores were wounded in the double blasts in Kirkuk, and a third explosion 45 minutes later on a road to a city hospital brought the number of injured to at least 70, said provincial health director Siddiq Omar.

The ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, claimed by Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen, is one of the more politically volatile parts of the country. US officials have long worried about what will happen in the city when American forces pull out of Iraq, as they’re scheduled to do by the end of this year.

Eyewitness Adnan Karim described “a chaos of terror and fear” at a parking lot outside the police compound in central Kirkuk where the first two bombs went off.

“I saw a lot of dead bodies, burned dead bodies,” said Karim, who owns a small shop about 100 metres from the police building and ran to the parking lot after the first explosion. The second one came about three minutes later, he said, and then “ambulances began to evacuate casualties of dead bodies and injured.”

Kirkuk police Capt. Abdul Salam Zangana said the first explosion around 9 am was from a bomb stuck to a car in the parking lot, which sent policemen rushing outside their secure headquarters compound to investigate. That’s when the second blast hit.