Baghdad, Nov 17: Wide areas of the Iraqi capital were without electric power today, but the head of the city's main power plant ruled out sabotage as a cause for the outage. Power went off around midnight local time and was still off some 10 hours later. The us compound and some major buildings were lit by generators.
The head of the al-Doura power plant, the city's largest, said that power supplies from the north to Baghdad were disrupted after heavy rains in the country and Baghdad plants became overloaded due to the shortage.
Jinan Matti said that power workers in Baghdad were working to restore electrical supplies.
A US military spokesman said the coalition press center was operating on generator power.

Bureau Report