Six dead in day of violence in Iraq
Insurgents targeted Iraqi and US forces with gunfire, suicide attacks and mortar rounds today, leaving at least six people dead – including a top anti-corruption official and a US soldier.
In the north, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a government compound in Mosul, killing himself and Walid Kashmoula, the head of the Iraqi police anti-corruption department, officials said. Three others were injured.
Al Qaida allegedly claimed responsibility for the attack.
Insurgents have increasingly targeted Iraqi security and government officials they see as collaborators with the US-led mission.
A homemade bomb exploded earlier today near the northern city of Kirkuk, killing a US soldier and injuring three others, the US military said in a statement.
Residents in Baghdad said saboteurs blew up a municipal building in a western neighbourhood, reducing the two-storey building to rubble. No injuries were reported. A Humvee was also overturned on the highway to the airport. Witnesses said it was hit by a roadside bomb, but US military officials were not immediately available to comment. US troops sealed off the area.
Militants also kept up their deadly campaign against Iraq’s fledgling security force, which is struggling to build its ranks and fight the lawlessness that has gripped the country in the two years since US President George W Bush ordered the US-led invasion on March 19, 2003.
Assailants leapt from their vehicle and unleashed gunfire on a policeman walking to work in Samarra, killing the man, said Maj Sadoun Ahmed, a police official in the Sunni Triangle town 60 miles north of Baghdad.
Police who went to collect the man’s body also came under attack, sparking a gunfight that left three police injured along with a trio of attackers, who were arrested, police Lt Qassim Mohammed said.
In the southern city of Basra, attackers targeted a police patrol with a roadside bomb, killing one civilian and injuring a policeman, said police Col Karim al-Zeidi.
Insurgents lobbed mortar fire into a neighbourhood just outside the walls of an Iraqi army base in the town of Mahmoudiyah, south of Baghdad, killing one civilian and injuring two others, said Ikbal Sabir, an official at the Yarmouk Hospital where the bodies were taken.
Meanwhile Iraq and Jordan pulled their highest-level diplomats from each others’ countries, two days after Iraqi demonstrators protesting the reported involvement of a Jordanian in a deadly suicide bomb attack raised their country’s flag over the Jordan embassy in Baghdad.
And in Jordan, a military court sentenced insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian himself, to 15 years in jail and a detained associate to three years behind bars for planning an attack on the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, the offices of the Jordanian military attache in Baghdad, and unspecified American targets in Iraq.
The court was told that the two Jordanians met in Iraq in November 2003 to plan an attack on the embassy following an August bombing on the same building that killed 18 people. Al-Zarqawi has also been accused of carrying out the August bombing.
The US has slapped an £18.7 million bounty on Al-Zarqawi, who has pledged loyalty to Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaida organisation and is now considered the terror outfit’s leader in Iraq. His whereabouts are unknown.
