An American humanitarian worker was among three people killed in a suicide car bomb attack on a convoy travelling on Baghdad's airport road, the US embassy said today.
Marla Ruzicka, 27, the founder of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, was driving behind a private security convoy when the car bomb exploded on Saturday, security officials said.
The identities of the others killed were not immediately known. Five people were wounded in the explosion and taken to a US military hospital inside Baghdad's Green Zone, a US embassy spokesman said.
Ruzicka, who grew up in California, had worked frequently in Iraq and Afghanistan trying to uncover details on the number of civilian casualties in the wars and secure compensation for the families of victims.
She also spent time cataloguing the impact of war on communities, often running great risks to do so.
She is one of at least half a dozen humanitarian workers who have been killed in Iraq. Four American Baptists were shot dead in a drive-by shooting near the northern city of Mosul in March last year.
And Margaret Hassan, a British-born aid worker who ran the Care International group in Iraq, was killed by her kidnappers after a month-long hostage ordeal in November last year.
The road to Baghdad's international airport is one of the most dangerous in the country, with almost daily suicide bomb blasts and ambushes.
Ruzicka was shortly due to leave Iraq to return to the United States to work on securing more funding for her group.