The blasts sent police officers fleeing across the compound. Officers in bloody, tattered blue uniforms were carried into nearby hospital wards, some of them wailing, their faces streaked with tears. U.S. soldiers piled out of Humvees and helped to seal off the inner courtyard, where the explosions had scattered body parts of trainees.
''They were all like brothers, they were all young,'' said Hassan Dawood, 32, a teacher at the academy, who was sobbing while lying on a marble bench in a hospital hallway, his head in the lap of a colleague. ''I just want to ask, 'Is this jihad? Is this jihad against Iraqis?' I want to ask the mujahedeen, 'Do you slaughter your brother in the name of jihad?' ''
The attack was the deadliest in Baghdad in months.
Striking at the very heart of the nascent Iraqi police, inside their main academy in eastern Baghdad, the attack showed that the insurgents have infiltrated the deepest levels of the Iraqi forces. Hundreds of police officers and potential recruits have been killed in the war, many in suicide bombings at recruitment centers across Iraq.
Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, the group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for the attack in an Internet posting, according to the SITE Institute, which tracks terrorist messages.
Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite network, broadcast a video from a militant group showing what appeared to be a captured American security consultant, the latest victim in a wave of abductions of Westerners. The video, which bore the logo of the Islamic Army in Iraq, a group led by former Baath Party members, showed the hostage, a blond man, sitting in jeans and a dark jacket with his hands tied behind his back.
It also showed close-ups of an identification card and the man's passport, which had the name of Ronald Alan Schulz, age 40. The captors said they would kill Schulz in 72 hours unless all detainees in Iraq were released and residents of Anbar province, the heart of the insurgency, were compensated for their losses.
The surge in abductions has raised fears that terrorists may once again start beheading Western captives and releasing videos of the killings.
At the White House, President Bush told reporters that the United States would not pay any ransom. ''What we will do, of course, is use our intelligence-gathering to see if we can't help locate them,'' he said.
