BAGHDAD, July 1 (Xinhua) -- A suicide car bomb attack Sunday on a warehouse complex in the northern city of Kirkuk killed a civilian and left 20 others wounded, a local police source said.
The suicide bomber drove the explosive-laden car to the entrance of the complex and blew the vehicle up. The ballot boxes used in the May 12 parliamentary elections were being stored at the site. Those were not damaged, Colonel Mahmoud al-Jubouri from Kirkuk police told Xinhua.
A medical source from Kirkuk Health Department told Xinhua that the hospitals in Kirkuk received a body of a civilian killed in the attack and some 20 people for treatment.
Hours later, Kirkuk's provincial police command issued a statement about the incident and said that terrorist elements carried out double bomb attacks at 5:45 a.m. local time (0245 GMT) on the warehouses site in Kirkuk city, some 250 km north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
The attack began with a blast by a rocket-propelled grenade targeting members of Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), guarding the huge storage site, along with a police force, according to the statement.
Afterwards, a suicide bomber rammed his explosive-packed sport utility vehicle into the entrance of the site and detonated it, the statement said.
The attacks did not cause any damage to the ballot boxes because the blasts were away from the warehouses, the statement said, adding that four CTS members and 10 policemen were among the wounded by the attacks.
Iraq's May 12 parliamentary elections were faced with a wave of criticisms and accusations of fraud and irregularities, prompting the outgoing Iraqi parliament on June 6 to pass an amendment on the election law demanding manual recount of votes in all polling stations across Iraq.
The parliament amendment was approved on June 21 by the country's federal court.
However, a panel of judges discussed the parliament law and reached an understanding that the recount would only be conducted for problematic ballots.
Many Iraqi parties, especially in the Kurdish region and the disputed areas, including Kirkuk province, have complained about alleged irregularities and forgery in the parliamentary elections.
The panel of nine judges, who replaced the nine members of the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), made a decision that the recount of votes of suspect polling centers will start "with the presence of IHEC members of each of the provinces of Kirkuk, Sulaimaniyah, Erbil, Dohuk, Nineveh, Salahudin and Anbar," Layth Jabur Hamza, the spokesman of the panel, said in a statement on Saturday.
The recount process is supposed to start in Kirkuk province and will extend successively in the other provinces according to dates to be set later by the commission, Hamza said without giving further details.
On June 10, a huge fire broke out at electoral commission's warehouses in Gailani neighborhood in downtown Baghdad, which contained ballot boxes of eastern side of Risafa in Baghdad and electronic counting devices.
The burned ballot boxes are part of a manual recount of votes.
On May 12, millions of Iraqis went to 8,959 polling centers across the country to vote for their representatives in the next 329-seat parliament that will form a new government and rule Iraq for the next four years.
