Bomb rips through service at mosque

BAGHDAD — A car bomb ripped through a crowded mosque during Friday prayers, killing eight persons and wounding 26 in the latest attack targeting Iraq’s Shi’ite majority. Frantic worshippers searched through rubble for loved ones, and women wailed and beat their chests in grief.

The U.S. military sent investigators to the grassy field north of Baghdad where a helicopter carrying 11 civilians was shot down Thursday. A video posted on a militant Web site suggested insurgents gunned down the lone survivor of the crash, and the Bulgarian company that owns the helicopter confirmed yesterday the man seen in the footage was indeed one of the aircraft’s pilots.

The violence was part of a surge of attacks that have caused heavy casualties in recent weeks, ending a relative lull since Iraqis voted in historic Jan. 30 elections. Iraqi leaders are struggling to form a Cabinet that will include members of the Sunni minority, believed to be the driving force in the insurgency.

Al Jazeera aired part of a video yesterday in which it said a militant group was threatening to kill three kidnapped Romanian journalists and their Iraqi-American translator unless Romanian troops leave Iraq within four days.

One U.S. soldier was killed yesterday by a roadside bomb north of Tal Afar, 95 miles east of the Syrian border, the military said. On Thursday, a U.S. Marine died in a nonhostile incident at Camp Delta, near Karmah, 50 miles west of Baghdad, the military said. More than 1,500 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war two years ago.

The car bomb exploded at Al-Subeih mosque, in the capital’s Shi’ite-dominated New Baghdad neighborhood, police Col. Ahmed Aboud said.

A 10-year-old child was among the dead, and the 26 wounded included two 9-year-olds, hospital officials said.

Shi’ite mosques and funerals have become a frequent target of Sunni-led insurgents. In February, suicide bombers attacked a number of them during the Shi’ite commemoration of Ashoura, killing nearly 100 people.

North of the capital, Col. Paul Bricker led a team of investigators who surveyed the site where the helicopter crashed Thursday, the military said.

The chartered flight between Baghdad and Tikrit was believed to be the first civilian aircraft shot down in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. A spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq said an American medevac team arrived at the site within a half hour of the crash and found no survivors.

The dead included six American bodyguards for U.S. diplomats, three Bulgarian crewmen and two security guards from Fiji, officials said.

Two militant groups claimed responsibility for shooting down the Russian-made Mi-8 helicopter and released video to support their claims.

A group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq posted footage on the Internet purporting to show militants capturing and shooting the lone survivor, found lying in the grass near burning wreckage and charred bodies.

Mihail Mihailov, the manager of Heli Air, the Bulgarian owner of the helicopter, identified the man in the footage as Lyubomir Kostov, one of the aircraft’s two pilots.