IRAQ: A suicide car-bombing sowed havoc in the heart of Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 13 people, five of them foreign contractors in a passing convoy.
Two Britons, a Frenchman and an American were among the dead. The US military said 10 contractors had been wounded.
The five contractors killed were employees of a subsidiary of the US conglomerate, General Electric, or security contractors working with the company.
Iraqi Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib said preliminary information suggested a foreigner carried out the attack.
"The initial information shows that the person who carried out the bombing was not Iraqi and came from outside Iraq," he told Al Arabiya television.
The US-led occupying power and Iraqi officials say foreign fighters have played a major role in the violence gripping Iraq.
Yesterday's blast was the second suicide bombing in the Iraqi capital in 24 hours and coincided with a wave of assassinations aimed at the new interim government appointed to take over from the US-British occupation authorities on June 30th.
Interim Prime Minister Mr Iyad Allawi said five foreign workers had been killed in the morning rush-hour attack, which devastated a busy street and ripped the front off one building.
"The terrorists are trying to prevent the transfer of power and sovereignty on June 30th," he told a news conference.
Hospital officials said at least eight other people, including two African workers, were also killed and dozens wounded, many of them with severe burns or limbs torn off by the blast near Tahrir (Liberation) Square.
In New York, a spokesman for General Electric said three of the dead contractors were employees of a wholly-owned GE subsidiary, and the other two were security staff contracted to the company's team in Iraq.
Police said a bomber in a red four-wheel-drive vehicle set off the explosion, hitting two other Coalition Provisional Authority vehicles.
On Sunday a suicide car bombing killed up to 12 Iraqis near a US-Iraqi base in Baghdad and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil servant and a university professor. A top Foreign Ministry official was assassinated the previous day.
The US military yesterday moved more prisoners from Abu Ghraib jail, at the heart of a scandal about prisoner abuse by US forces, under a programme to cut numbers there by June 30th.
Witnesses said eight buses left the jail near Baghdad. The military had said 585 prisoners would be freed yesterday.
In London, Britain said it would charge four soldiers with indecently assaulting prisoners while they were serving in Iraq.
A spokesman for the Attorney-General's office said: "The charges include assault, indecent assault and the military charge of prejudicing good order and military discipline."