I just can’t imagine a city where so much explosive metal is lying around. The latest in the line of stories which at the moment could only happen in Baghdad is an explosion - the Karadah street, just off the main road. A photographer walks down that road and sees someone lying on the street with loads of blood around him and missing one leg. No one wants to get near him. The guy had a hand grenade in his pocket, the idiot. And somehow the detonator goes off, boom, bye-bye leg.
The funny thing was that there were some people around the guy who looked around very nervously. No one would tell you what was going on. Until you meet the friendly small shop owner who knows everybody. He says the actual explosion happened in a tea-shop down the road where lots of no-good types meet. And the guy’s hand grenade blew up in that tea-shop but his "friends" were so anxious that no one comes in that tea-shop, snoops around and finds god knows what, they clean the place up real fast, drag him to the other end of the street and leave him there.
Why would he have a hand grenade in his pocket? Well, many reasons. I don’t think he is the fedayeen type, like that taxi driver I met a couple of days ago. It just happens to be the weapon of choice for house robberies, you can’t say no to a man with a hand grenade, can you?
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