World News 27-10-2003 Baghdad Ambulance Bomb Kills 18 who: Deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz what: Narrowly escapes daring missile attack where: Baghdad, Iraq when: Yesterday snippet: "At least 18 people including a US soldier have reportedly been killed in a series of bomb blasts that rocked central Baghdad," reports Sky News. The targets appear to be two police stations and the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which was hit by a suicide bomb in an ambulance injuring 22 people and claiming 18 lives. The attacks happened after the newspaper deadlines but it comes just a day after "one of the most audacious attacks yet on the US-led administration in Iraq", says The Guardian. Yesterday at 6am, "resistance fighters fired a rocket salvo at the Rashid hotel in Baghdad, narrowly missing Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, who had been staying there." "The attack against one of the main architects of the US-led invasion struck at the nerve centre of the allied occupation," reports James Hider of The Times from Baghdad. "The bombardment killed an American colonel and injured 15 others, including a British Treasury official on secondment to the interim ruling authority." "A trailer-mounted battery of GRAD rockets, similar to those used by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, were used in the attack," reports The Scotsman`s Tim Ripley. "The attackers set the rockets on a timer and then made their escape, in a form of hit-and-run strike the US army has not encountered in Iraq before." [... more]

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