Iraq's al-Qaeda group said it had carried out a suicide car bombing that killed at least 12 police recruits in Arbil, according to a statement posted on the Internet today.
Officials had said that a suicide bomber drove his car into a crowd of Iraqi traffic police trainees in the northern Kurdish city yesterday, also wounding about 100.
“They were not traffic police ... it was a volunteer centre of the pagan (national) guards,” the group led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said in a statement posted on a Web site used by Islamists.
It said it had been late in claiming responsibility for the attack because “roads and communications were down”.
Zarqawi's group is one of the leaders of a bloody insurgency against US forces and the Iraqi government.