Iraqi police stop child suicide bomber

 

A child wearing an explosives belt was stopped and disarmed by Iraqi officials in Kirkuk soon after a suicide explosion at a mosque.

The youth, age 12 or 13, was captured Sunday before he could detonate his explosives belt in Kirkuk’s Huzairan neighborhood. The arrest came about an hour after a suicide bomb outside a Shiite mosque in the Kurdish-controlled city killed a bomber and wounded at least 2 other people.

The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the mosque bombing. Shortly before the mosque attack, another bomb attack caused no injuries, Rudaw reported.

The captured youth was displaced from Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, by recent military operations and arrived in Kirkuk a week ago, Kirkuk intelligence official Chato Fadhil Humadi told the Associated Press.

Humadi said that the boy claimed during interrogation that he had been kidnapped by masked men who put the explosives on him and sent him to the area.