A car bombing in Baghdad has left at least 51 killed, Iraqi police said tonight.

Iraqi security forces are doing everything they can to protect victims of sectarian violence in Baghdad, including families that are being driven from their homes in mixed neighbourhoods of Shiites and Sunni Arabs, a government official said today.

Revenge-seeking militiamen seized six Sunnis as they left prayers and burned them alive with kerosene in a savage new twist to the brutality shaking the Iraqi capital.

Sunni residents in a volatile north-west Baghdad neighbourhood today claimed revenge-seeking Shiite militiamen had destroyed four Sunni mosques, burned homes and killed many people, while the Shiite-dominated police force stood by and did nothing.

US and Iraqi forces swept into Baghdad’s Sadr City Shiite slum in an early morning raid today, killing four Iraqis, wounding eight and detaining five, police said.

Six bomb attacks in Baghdad killed at least 17 people and wounded more than 50 today, hours before a highly anticipated ceremony in which the US-led coalition was to hand over control of the country’s armed forces command to Iraqi authorities.

Assailants in speeding cars gunned down a police commando as he was leaving his house in south Baghdad today, and drive-by shooters killed a lawyer as she got out of a taxi in the southern city of Basra, police said.

A 13-YEAR-OLD boy was killed by a roadside bomb as he walked to school in the southern city of Basra, one of more than 20 victims of violence that continued to rattle Iraq yesterday as political leaders remained deadlocked over a new government.

Sunnis and Shiites have traded bombings and mortar fire against mainly religious targets in Baghdad, killing at least 68 people after authorities lifted a curfew that had briefly calmed a series of sectarian reprisal attacks.

TWO explosions hit Shi’ite targets in war-torn Iraq after sundown yesterday, killing at least 15 people and raising the death toll for the day to at least 56.

Two explosions hit Shiite targets in northern Baghdad after sundown today, killing at least 15 people and wounding 72, police said. The attacks raised the death toll for the day to at least 56.

Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms broke into the home of a Sunni parliamentary candidate today and killed him, his three sons and his son-in-law on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Paul Garwood, Baghdad

Gunmen assassinated the governor of Baghdad province and six of his bodyguards in an ambush today, and a suicide tanker truck bomber killed 10 people at an Interior Ministry commando headquarters in western Baghdad.

Gunmen assassinated the governor of the Iraqi province that includes Baghdad, Ali al-Haidari, today, police officials said.

Three civilians were reported killed and two injured in a bomb blast in a mosque in Baghdad early today.