Suicide attacks leave 56 dead in Iraqi city

At least 56 people were killed on Sunday in twin suicide attacks on the offices of Kurdish political parties in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil, medical sources said. Officials at one of the hospitals that received victims of the blast said they had the corpses of at least 50 people killed in the bombings. Officials said earlier up to 200 people had been killed or wounded. Meanwhile, about 20 Iraqis were killed on Sunday when they set off an explosion while looting a former army ammunition dump under the cover of darkness, a spokesman for the Polish-led peacekeepers said. The blast, apparently accidental, occurred around midnight about 180 km southwest of Karbala, in an array of munitions bunkers in the desert, spokesman Col Robert Strzelecki said. “I suspect that those people who entered the bunkers probably wanted to steal the munition and sell it, perhaps to terrorist groups,” he told The Associated Press by telephone.