BAQUBA, Iraq, 23 January 2008 — A suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to a school in the restive city of Baquba yesterday, wounding 21 people as the blast ripped through a crowd of teachers and pupils, police said. “Four women teachers and 17 pupils were wounded, including five very young boys,” said police Maj. Ahmed Al-Karkhi.

The attacker targeted Al-Mutwra School in the middle of Baquba, 60 kilometers north of Baghdad, as pupils were arriving for morning classes, Karkhi said. The attack was the fifth by a suicide bomber in Baquba this month and follows a similar assault on a funeral ceremony for a police colonel’s relative on Monday near the north-central city of Baiji, which killed 17 mourners.

US military spokesman Rear Adm. Gregory Smith told a news conference on Sunday that 40 to 50 foreign fighters sneak into Iraq each month mostly to carry out suicide bombings.

Meanwhile, Iraqi security forces found the bodies of seven family members yesterday, all bearing signs of torture and shot execution-style, as they hunted Al-Qaeda fighters outside, police said. Police said the bodies were those of a father and his five sons as well as a nephew.

Diyala province, of which Baquba is the capital, has replaced western Anbar as one of the most violent areas of Iraq after Sunni Islamist Al-Qaeda was driven out of Anbar and the Baghdad area during security crackdowns last year.

While attacks, including suicide bombings, which are most often blamed on Al-Qaeda, are common throughout Diyala, yesterday’s discovery was particularly gruesome and unusual because of the large number of family members involved.