Iraq on Sunday showed a video of what it said was a follower of late president Saddam Hussein's Baath party confessing to organising one of the truck bomb atatcks last week in which 95 people died. The man said he had planned the bombing attack together with a leader of a branch of the now outlawed Baath party who was living in Syria.
"A month ago Sattam Farhan ... called from Syria and asked me to conduct a bombing operation to shake the administration," said the man, described as a former police chief named Wissam Ali Kadhim Ibrahim. "He said that if you can't do it, we have other factions that can."
Baghdad security spokesman Qassim al-Moussawi, who showed the video to the media representatives, had previously announced the arrest of a group of Baathists he alleged were responsible for Wednesday's bombings, which devastated the foreign and finance ministries.
According to Reuters, his office said on Sunday shortly after the taped confession was aired that every police officer manning checkpoints on the day of the attacks between Baghdad and Diyala province, where the prisoner said the attack was put together, had been detained.
In the video, the man did not mention trucks or the foreign ministry. He hinted at collusion by someone in the security forces. "I called someone in Muqdadiya (in Diyala province) to ease the passage of the car through checkpoints to Baghdad. He asked for $10,000," the man said.
"A person called Sattar called me from Baghdad and told me that a car had been prepared in Khalis (in Diyala). I sent this person (from Muqdadiya) to Khalis who brought the car to Baghdad ... and it exploded outside the finance ministry."
