14 Are Killed In Explosion At Building In Mosul

BAGHDAD — Victims were still being pulled from the rubble late Wednesday night in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, where a building used by insurgents to store ammunition and other explosives blew up in a crowded neighborhood, killing at least 14 people and wounding 134, according to the police.

The numbers were expected to climb as people were pulled from beneath the collapsed walls of nearby houses and shops, which were destroyed by the blast.

The explosion took place in Al Zinjeli, a poor neighborhood on the western side of Mosul. Plumes of smoke could be seen from miles away.

“I was in my house with my family,” said Ahmed Mushtaq, one of the wounded, speaking by telephone from his hospital bed.

“At about 4:30 p.m., I felt the house shake strongly, and the windows disconnected from the wall and the doors were destroyed, and then a wave of red smoke covered the house, and a piece of wood hit me in my back and my head, and I lost consciousness,” Mr. Mushtaq said. “After that I found myself in the hospital, and my wife and kids were also wounded, and they are with me at the same hospital.”

Samir Faraj, a doctor at the Medical City hospital, the largest in Mosul, said that many victims were badly cut by glass as windows and doors shattered and that many had lost arms or legs.

The Mosul police said an insurgent whom they had captured told them that the house was a bomb factory filled with explosives. As the police approached the house, it exploded, said Brig. Said al-Jubori, spokesman for the police force in Nineveh Province, of which Mosul is the capital.

Earlier in the day, a Sunni Arab professor in the computer department of Mosul University’s science college was shot and killed by gunmen, Brigadier Jubori said. The professor, Abdul-Aziz Nuaymi, was a moderate who was not believed to have had ties to any political party.

Mosul was relatively calm in the first months after the war, when many American troops were in the area. In the fall of 2004, though, some insurgents migrated to Mosul after fleeing Falluja. They overran the police force in western Mosul, and there were battles for control of several parts of the city. Mosul then calmed somewhat, but recently, as American troops have drawn down, activity by extremist Sunni insurgents has been rising again.

Sunni Arabs dominate the neighborhood where Wednesday’s blast took place, but the city also has a significant ethnic Kurdish population. The government in nearby Iraqi Kurdistan has sought to annex portions of Nineveh Province. That tension has driven some local Sunni Arabs to allow the insurgents to operate in the province.

Mosul was long a base for supporters of Saddam Hussein. Many of Mr. Hussein’s military officers originally came from the Mosul area, and it was where his sons sought refuge in 2003. They were killed there by the Americans that summer.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accepted an invitation on Wednesday to visit Iraq, but no date has been set, according to the office of the Iraqi government’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh. It would be the first visit to Iraq by an Iranian president since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Violence also struck Wednesday near the northern city of Kirkuk when a suicide bomber detonated his car in a market in the town of Dibis, killing seven people and wounding 14, according to Col. Aras Abdullah, a police commander.

In Baghdad, gunmen killed three Iraqi Army soldiers and wounded two civilians in the Bab al-Muadam neighborhood in a drive-by shooting at a military checkpoint, according to an official in the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

Three unidentified bodies were found on Wednesday in Baghdad, the ministry official said.

Qais Mizher contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Mosul and Kirkuk.

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