12 Killed at Iraqi fighter jet accidentally Bombs

Rescuers evacuate the body of a victim killed from a bombing in the eastern neighborhood of New Baghdad. Iraq, Monday, July 6, 2015. At least a dozen civilians were killed on Monday when a Russian-made fighter jet accidentally dropped a bomb over a Baghdad neighborhood, officials said.


An Iraqi fighter jet accidentally dropped a bomb over a Baghdad neighborhood on Monday, killing at least 12 people on the ground, Iraqi officials said.

The plane — one of several Russian-made Sukhois used by Iraq in the fight against the Islamic State group — was returning to base when the accident happened. Military spokesman Brig. Gen. Saad Maan Ibrahim told The Associated Press that a technical failure caused the Sukhoi jet to drop the bomb, which hit a number of houses in the Iraqi capital's eastern neighborhood of New Baghdad.

Iraq is going through its worst crisis since the 2011 withdrawal of U.S. troops. The Islamic State group controls large swaths of the country's north and west following a blitz last year when the militants captured Iraq's second-largest city of Mosul and the majority of the western Anbar province.

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Also Monday, separate attacks in and around Baghdad killed at least seven people. The deadliest took place in Baghdad's southern suburb of Arab Jabour when a booby-trapped house exploded, killing three members of security forces and wounding nine, a police officer said.

In another attack, two soldiers were killed and five hurt when mortar rounds hit their base in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, the officer said. And two civilians were killed and six wounded in a bomb explosion at an outdoor market in the western Ghazaliyah neighborhood.