Iraq restaurant bombing wounds 20 -Kurd official

Reuters | 6/29/02

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TUNCELI, Turkey, June 29 (Reuters) - A restaurant bombing in Kurdish-run northern Iraq wounded 20 people, two seriously, a northern Iraqi Kurdish official said on Saturday.

No one was killed when the blast damaged the restaurant on Wednesday in Arbil, a city controlled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party, a KDP official told a news conference in the Turkish town of Tunceli.

He said it was not clear who planted the bomb in the city about 90 km (60 miles) northwest of Kirkuk.

But KDP sources in Arbil said police were investigating members of Jund al-Islam, a militant Islamic group that has clashed repeatedly with the KDP's rival group, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

The KDP and PUK have run northern Iraq since a Kurdish uprising against Baghdad's control at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. The Kurdish enclave is protected by a no-fly zone patrolled by U.S. and British warplanes.

The PUK says Jund al-Islam members were trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. But there is no independent confirmation of a link to al Qaeda, blamed by Washington for the September 11 attacks.

((Ankara newsroom, 90 312-459 9000, fax 90 312-446 4813, turk.newsroom@reuters.com))

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