****But these people didn’t deserve to live, they were after all attempting to bring security to their country, a crime punishable by death without judge or jury decided and carried out by the insurgency terrorists. ****
…
**Pools of blood
**At least seven cars parked near the center were destroyed by the blast. Several nearby buildings were damaged.
Pools of blood formed on the street outside the center as ambulances and cabs raced to the chaotic scene to take casualties to hospitals.
The attack came as many civilians were applying for Iraqi police jobs at the recruitment center, said Capt. Mark Walter, the spokesman who provided the U.S. military death toll.
Police officer Shwan Mohammed first said that the attacker had set the explosives off inside the police center, but police Capt. Othman Aziz later said the attacker detonated them outside the building because of the heavy security there.
Iraqi civilian Hawra Mohammed, 37, said he had just dropped his brother Ahmed, 32, off at the center to apply for a job and driven away when the explosion occurred.
When Hawra raced back, he found his brother lying in a street, bleeding and unconscious. But Ahmed soon began to move.
“I lifted my brother onto my shoulders and took him to a nearby hospital,” Hawra said in an interview. “The blood on my shirt is my brother’s.”
Hawra said he nearly fainted at the sight of dead bodies outside the recruitment center and that many of the victims were unemployed, just like his brother, and wanted to earn money as policemen.
The attack appeared to be the deadliest by insurgents in Iraq since Feb. 28, when a suicide car bomber struck a crowd of police and national guard recruits outside a medical clinic in Hillah, south of the capital. That attack, which killed 110 people and wounded 133, was the single deadliest in the insurgency.
Militants have stepped up their attacks across Iraq in the last week, often targeting convoys of U.S. and Iraqi troops, and Iraqi police on patrol or at recruitment centers. A key goal of U.S. troops is to eventually train enough Iraqi security forces to reduce the role now being played by the Americans in fighting the insurgency.
