Black day for Iraq as 89 killed in attacks

INSURGENTS killed 89 people in a devastating series of co-ordinated attacks against police and government buildings across Sunni Muslim areas of Iraq yesterday, less than a week before the handover of sovereignty.

Three US soldiers were killed and over 300 were wounded.

Most of the deaths were in Mosul, where 44 people were killed and 216 injured in attacks that included a string of car bombs. Clashes also occurred in Baqouba, Ramadi, Baghdad and other areas.

The attacks could be the start of a push to torpedo Wednesday's transfer of sovereignty to an interim transitional government.

Saad al-Amely, an official at the Iraqi Health Ministry, said hospitals were flooded with the wounded.

The military wing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group, the Tawhid and Jihad movement, claimed responsibility for the attacks in a statement on an Islamic website.

It read that members of the "martyrs' battalion" had carried out a number of "blessed operations". The heaviest fighting raged in Baqouba, 35 miles north- east of Baghdad, where two US soldiers were killed and seven were wounded.

US aircraft dropped three 500-pound bombs against an insurgent position near Baqouba football stadium.

Insurgents roamed the city with rocket launchers and automatic weapons, seized two police stations and destroyed the home of the police chief of the surrounding Diyala province.

In other attacks, a man dressed as a policeman detonated a car bomb near a checkpoint manned by Iraqi and US soldiers in the Baghdad district of Dora, killing four Iraqi soldiers.

Also in Baghdad, insurgents attacked four Iraqi police stations using mortars, hand grenades and AK-47s. Police fought back, and defended the stations with minimal assistance from coalition forces, a US statement said.

At the main hospital in Baqouba, doctors struggled to deal with a steady stream of wounded. Doctors stood in pools of blood. Civilian cars raced to the door of the emergency ward bringing people with gunshot and shrapnel wounds.

"May God destroy America and all those who co-operate with it," screamed one man in the corridor. Another man who drove up outside the hospital screamed: "Oh God, Abbas is dead". He later carried in the body of a young man with a bullet hole in the back of his head.

The city, which has a mix of Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, was almost deserted. US gunships flew low over the city, some swooping down on suspected rebel hideouts in palm groves.

US tanks, some firing machine-guns, moved into the city centre by afternoon.

Guerrillas also targeted security forces in the northern city of Mosul, where car bombs rocked the Iraqi Police Academy, two police stations and the al-Jumhuri hospital. One US soldier died in Mosul.

Iraq's interim prime minister Iyad Allawi said the attacks were an attempt to harm the Iraqi people and "to foil the democratic process". He said the situation was under control.