IRAQ: Essam survived; his brother was less lucky. Jack Fairweatherreports from Iskanderiya
Essam Hussein was late joining the queue outside Iskandariya police station.
A recruitment drive by the local force had brought out Essam and hundreds of others eager to sign yesterday. They were easy targets for the terrorists.
Seconds after Essam lined up a truck packed with explosives drove past the entrance to the station and detonated.
"I heard a terrible explosion and felt heavy weights hitting my body," said the 23-year-old former soldier. "When I woke up I discovered they were the body parts of the people beside me."
He was one of only a handful of survivors to walk away from the smoking ruins of the station. The blast had reduced its crash barriers into piles of gore and dust and early-morning traffic on the street to twisted wrecks.
At the station's entrance was a 1.5-metre wide crater and three odd shoes.
"I thought I was lucky to be alive when I saw so many dead bodies," said Essam, who was forced to flee the scene when an American convoy farther up the street began firing warning shots.
Throughout the morning ambulances ferried the dead and injured to the local hospital, while American forces set up a security cordon.
Essam only discovered several hours later that his 14-year-old brother, Ibrahim, collecting diesel at a nearby petrol pump, had been decapitated by flying shrapnel.
"I'm not going to become a police man now," he said, standing in his family's hastily erected funeral tent. "This has been a black and terrible day."
Yesterday residents of Iskandariya reacted with shock and anger at the suicide blast in the midst of their sleepy Shia town an hour south of Baghdad. It had been spared the violence seen further to the north. American officials had touted the town as a model of the reconstruction.
"We've never seen anything like this before," said the town's police chief, Mr Abdul Rahim Saleh, who wept as he spoke. "We thought we had made a safe and peaceful town. We were wrong. It will take us many months to recover what the terrorists have destroyed in a day."
The crowd outside the station, however, was looking for an easy target for their anger. As American forces withdrew from the station yesterday afternoon a mob formed shouting: "No, no, to the Americans".
Few blamed resistance forces responsible for attacking dozens of police stations farther north and threatening sectarian violence by targeting Shia. Instead rumours circulated that the attack had been a missile strike carried out by a US warplane.
"I heard the whoosh of air made by a missile," claimed one witness to the explosion. "The Americans want instability in Iraq so they can remain here for ever," shouted another man.
There were angry scenes at the town's hospital, where hundreds of casualties had been treated over the course of the day. At the hospital's morgue a row of dead bodies had been laid out in the sun for relatives to identify.
Several bodies were mangled beyond recognition. One of the families refused to approach the bodies. "When I last saw my son, Mohammed, he was excited at getting a job with the police," said one man, too distressed to give his name. "That is how I will to remember him. Not as a corpse."
Dr Ali Kafaji, the doctor on duty at the time of the attack, said: "What sort of resistance is this that attacks innocent people? Today's attack is against all honest Iraqis, and every man who has humanity."