Car blast kills two in Baghdad

A car bomb in Baghdad has killed two civilians and wounded four more this morning, police said, a day after Egypt’s top envoy to Iraq was kidnapped in an apparent bid to dissuade the country’s Arab neighbours from strengthening ties to the US-backed government.

The car bomb was parked on a street in the capital’s western area and was detonated by remote control, police said. One of the victims was a woman.

Elsewhere, four gunmen killed a senior member of the Kurdish Democratic Party’s Mosul branch, a party spokesman said. Jirjis Mohammed Amin was shot inside his sister’s home in the northern city.

A second attack by gunmen in Mosul killed a bodyguard of the provincial Nineveh governor, police said. He was killed in front of his home in the eastern part of the city, which is the capital of Nineveh province.

Mosul, 225 miles north-west of Baghdad, is the country’s third-largest city and considered an insurgent stronghold.

Yesterday Egyptian diplomat Ihab al-Sherif, 51, chief of his country’s diplomatic mission in Baghdad, was kidnapped. Witnesses said he was seized by about eight gunmen after he stopped to buy a newspaper in western Baghdad.

Al-Sherif, who had been in the country since June 1, was pistol-whipped and forced into the trunk of a car as the assailants shouted that he was an ‘American spy”, the witnesses said.

More than 1,400 people have been killed in insurgent attacks since Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his new government, dominated by Shiites and Kurds, on April 28.