MOSUL: A suicide bomber tricked soldiers into believing he was bringing much needed food supplies to a northern Iraqi town on Tuesday in the deadliest of a spate of attacks that killed more than 70 people around Iraq.
The blast ripped through Tal Afar after a crowd of hungry Iraqis surrounded the vehicle that residents and soldiers believed was a supply convoy following a week of food shortages.
But just moments after being waved into the area by Iraqi soldiers, the bomber detonated his cargo of flour and explosives, killing and wounding those around just three days after a marketplace suicide attack in the same town.
An Iraqi army officer told AFP that 50 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in the truck bombing and a separate car bombing in the same town of some 200,000 people.
The US military, which scrambled helicopters to evacuate the wounded to US medical facilities, said several buildings collapsed in the explosion that blasted a 15-metre diametre crater out of the ground.
Tuesday's bombings raised further concerns about escalating insecurity in the mixed Shiite-Sunni town after US President George W Bush last year held it up as a model for coalition efforts to create a stable Iraq.
On March 20, 2006 Bush hailed the onetime militant stronghold as "a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq". Since then, Iraqi violence has reached such a pitch that even the Pentagon has cited elements of civil war.
