Twin bombs kill 27 at police station in Iraq [View All]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_IRAQ?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-05-19-08-44-45

KIRKUK, Iraq (AP) -- Twin bombs that lured policemen out of their fortified headquarters in a northern Iraqi city killed 27 people on Thursday, most of them police officers.

Scores were wounded in the double blasts in Kirkuk, and a third explosion 45 minutes later on a road to a city hospital brought the number of injured to at least 70, said provincial health director Siddiq Omar.

The ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, claimed by Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen, is one of the more politically volatile parts of the country. U.S. officials have long worried about what will happen in the city and region when American forces pull out of Iraq, as they're scheduled to do by the end of this year.

Eyewitness Adnan Karim described "a chaos of terror and fear" at a parking lot outside the police compound in central Kirkuk where the first two bombs went off.