Iraq has arrested a suspect responsible for a bombing in Baghdad’s Karrada district in 2016 which left 323 people dead and 250 wounded, the prime minister said Monday.  

Mustafa al-Kadhimi said on Twitter that “5 years after the terrorist bombing of Karrada, our brave forces succeeded in capturing the terrorist Ghazwan Alzawbaee in a complex intelligence operation outside the country. He is the primary culprit behind the Karrada atrocity and many others.”

At the time, Daesh/ISIS claimed responsibility for the Karrada suicide bombing.

"This terrorist carried out many criminal operations against the Iraqi people and the security forces," Maj. Gen. Yahya Rassoul, the spokesman for the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, said in a statement.

“The most prominent of these operations are the detonation of a booby-trapped vehicle in the Karrada area in 2016, and the supervision of a twin bombing in Baghdad in the same year by a suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt, followed by the detonation of a booby-trapped vehicle containing another suicide bomber.”

A week ago, Al-Kadhimi announced the arrest of Sami Jasim al-Jaburi, the deputy of former Daesh/ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, during a cross-border security operation.

In 2017, Iraq declared victory over Daesh/ISIS by reclaiming all territories the terrorist group controlled since the summer of 2014, which was estimated to be about a third of the country’s territory.

The group, however, still maintains sleeper cells in large areas in Iraq and occasionally launches sporadic attacks./aa