SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi on Monday announced the arrest of the mastermind behind a deadly 2016 bombing in a Baghdad shopping center, which killed around 300 people and wounded 250.
The suicide car bombing in the central Karradah district was the deadliest attack by a single bomber in the Iraqi capital after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
“More than five years after the Karradah bombing, which broke the hearts of Iraqis, our heroic forces, after a complex intelligence pursuit outside Iraq, succeeded in arresting the terrorist Ghazwan al-Zubai, nicknamed Abu Ubaida Baghdad, who was responsible for this crime and other crimes,” Kadhimi said in a tweet.
Earlier, AP cited two Iraqi intelligence officials as saying that the man, an Iraqi, was detained during a complex operation that was carried out with the cooperation of a neighboring country they did not name. He had been tracked by authorities for months.
They told The Associated Press that al-Zobai was detained in an unidentified foreign country and transported to Iraq two days ago.
The 29-year-old al-Zobai was an al-Qaida militant when he was imprisoned by the Americans in Iraq at Cropper prison until 2008, and then escaped from Abu Ghraib prison in 2013, according to AP. He joined the Islamic State group after that.
The officials said al-Zobai plotted many attacks in Iraq, the most infamous of which was the 2016 bombing in Karrada in 2016. He operated under the Alias Abu Obaida.
At least 292 people died from the bombing, most of them from an ensuing fire that turned the Hadi shopping center into an inferno. The blaze was fed by a tinderbox of shops filled with clothing and oil-based perfumes for sale and lined with flammable panels.
Al-Zobai’s arrest came in the second such operation conducted by the Iraqi National Intelligence Service since Iraq’s federal elections Oct. 10.
Iraqi officials said they captured Sami Jasim, an ISIS leader last Monday in a similar operation abroad.
