Five people were killed and 20 wounded in suicide car bombing earlier today in Baghdad, according to a Health Ministry official. A police spokesman had said earlier that the car bomb exploded in downtown Baghdad as a police convoy drove by. The Associated Press quoted a witness as saying that shrapnel rained down on his stationary shop in the central Al-Mutanabbi Street. "People coming from the blast location said that a car, a Chevrolet type, exploded," said Haqqi Ismael, 25. "Iraqi police and American soldiers are there now." Security forces blocked off the area. A second blast shook the city less than an hour later. The cause of that explosion was not immediately known. U.S. military and Iraqi Interior Ministry officials had no immediate information on either incident.
