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BAGHDAD (Reuters) – An explosion rocked a restaurant inside the Iraqi parliament in Baghdad while lawmakers were having lunch, wounding dozens of people, a parliamentary official and a Reuters witness said.
The parliament building is located in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad. Militants have rarely managed to penetrate the various checkpoints and carry out attacks, although they frequently fire mortars and rockets into the zone.
A Reuters witness said the blast took place at the cashier’s register in the cafe, which is near parliament’s main assembly hall. Parliament was in session on Thursday.
“There was a big blast, I saw the fire. There were many, many wounded. Windows were shattered,” said the witness who was lightly wounded in the arm.
Recently, the U.S. military said two suicide vests had been found inside the zone, a sprawling area that comprises many government buildings and the U.S. embassy.
Earlier, a truck bomb killed at least seven people on a key bridge in northern Baghdad, destroying most of the steel structure and sending several cars plunging into the River Tigris below, police said.
Two main sections of the Sarafiya bridge, a main artery linking east and west Baghdad, collapsed into the river. One army officer on the scene said explosive charges might have also been used to bring down a bridge that local residents said was built by the British in the early 1900s.
Among the dead were four policemen who drowned after their car toppled into the river’s muddy waters, police said.
U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a security crackdown in the capital two months ago that has reduced death squad killings, but car and truck bombs still kill and wound scores.
The destruction of the bridge will cause major disruption in northern Baghdad. Two other bridges across the Tigris in that part of the capital are shut for security reasons while another is regarded by many residents as too dangerous to use.
“There is a conspiracy to isolate the two halves of Baghdad,” parliament Speaker Mahmoud Mashhadani, an outspoken Sunni politician, told lawmakers.
A dozen bridges cross the Tigris in Baghdad, linking the east and west of the city.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
