Saturday's attack occurred in the same Tal Afar market where a suicide truck bomber killed 28 people and injured 72 last month.

Police said the bomber detonated his explosive-laden car near a crowd of people gathered around a traffic accident in the market, which was crowded with shoppers buying food for the traditional evening meal that breaks the daily fast in the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Elsewhere in the north, Kurdish security forces raided a house in Irbil province, killed a suspected member of an al-Qaida front group and captured a 17-year-old girl wearing an explosives vest, provincial police said.

Honduras

ex-prison official issued 1,051 years

TEGUCIGALPA | A Honduran court has sentenced a former prison official to 1,051 years in jail for the deaths of 69 people in a 2003 prison massacre.

The three-judge panel announced its largely symbolic verdict against prison official Dimas Antonio Benitez on Saturday. Honduran law says people can't be jailed for more than 30 years.

Benitez was one of the directors at the El Porvenir prison where 65 inmates, a guard and three visitors died in an intentionally set fire in 2003.

The court sentenced Benitez, 10 other prison employees and 10 inmate trustees for having helped set fire to cells holding inmates who belonged to a violent "Mara" street gang.

The other defendants were sentenced to lesser jail terms.

Armenia

Turkish leader's visit brings protest

YEREVAN | Thousands of Armenians lined the streets of the capital Saturday to protest the first-ever visit by a Turkish leader and to demand that Turkey acknowledge the World War I massacres of Armenian civilians as genocide.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul was invited to Yerevan to watch the World Cup qualifying soccer match between his nation and Armenia alongside Armenian President Serge Sarkisian. Turkey won the game 2- 0 with two second-half goals.

Many hoped the so-called football diplomacy would help the two neighbors overcome decades of antagonism rooted in the WWI-era atrocities that began in 1915.

Russia

President: country ready for anything

MOSCOW | President Dmitry Medvedev declared Saturday that "Russia is a nation to be reckoned with" following its war with Georgia, again putting the West on notice that Moscow is prepared to use its military and economic might.

With a U.S. Navy ship unloading aid off Georgia's Black Sea coast within shooting distance of Russian troops, Medvedev's comments were another reminder that the Kremlin views last month's war as the start of a new era in Russian assertiveness.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, said "the truth is on our side" and likened the situation in the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia with Srebrenica - the Bosnian town that was the site of Europe's worst mass carnage since World War II.

In France, the European Union's 27 foreign ministers said they were reluctant to provoke Moscow.

(c) 2008 Virginian - Pilot. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.