Police and hospital officials said Saturday that two people had died in a massive explosion of a gas tanker in west Baghdad, just hours after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld left the capital after a surprise visit. Initially U.S. military sources said one person died and 19 were wounded in the explosion of the butane truck that was parked near the Libyan Embassy in the upscale Mansour district that also houses other foreign missions and is home to many top Iraqi officials. On Saturday, a spokesman for the al-Yarmouk Hospital said that one of the injured died overnight of severe burns. Police spokesman Mohamed Muhsen confirmed the casualty figures. There were no members of the multinational forces among the casualties, said Capt. Brian Lucas, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. Three nearby houses were damaged by the blast, though there were no injuries inside the embassies. Rumsfeld's surprise one-day tour in Iraq took him to the cities of Mosul, Fallujah and Tikrit and the heavily barricaded Green Zone in Baghdad _ he did not visit the Mansour area _ and throughout his meetings with U.S. troops, he insisted that the insurgency that plagued the country for months would be defeated.
