KUT: Iraqi police arrested three suspected Al-Qaeda members implicated in a deadly car bombing earlier this week in a pre-dawn raid south of Baghdad on Friday, a senior officer said.
The three men confessed to masterminding Wednesday’s bombing in the city of Kut, southeast of Baghdad, which killed 20 people and wounded 90 and which they said was carried out by a Sudanese suicide bomber, police Lieutenant Colonel Aziz Al-Imara said.
"We arrested three Iraqi members of Al-Qaeda in a house in Al-Khanasa," a small Sunni Arab village south of the capital, Imara told AFP.
"They admitted being behind the suicide attack against a police station in Kut and said the bomber was Sudanese," he added.
"They said they had received help from residents of Kut in carrying out the attack and said they had liaised with the terrorists who carried out the other attacks against security forces elsewhere in Iraq on Wednesday."
The Kut bombing was among more than a dozen apparently coordinated car bombs targeting Iraqi police and other attacks blamed on Al-Qaeda which killed 53 people on Wednesday, just days before the US military ends its combat mission.
The bloodshed triggered concern that Iraqi forces are not yet ready to handle security on their own, especially with no new government formed in Baghdad since a March 7 general election.
But the White House insisted on Thursday that Iraq is capable of meeting its own security needs despite the drawdown of US force levels to less than 50,000 troops, who from next month will be deployed on an "advise and assist" mission.
Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki blamed the latest violence on Al-Qaeda and remnants of the Baath party of now executed dictator Saddam Hussein, who he said wanted "to shake people’s confidence in the security forces."
