10 killed in Baghdad suicide bombing

A suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt today in a line of Iraqis waiting to receive government payments, killing 10 people and wounding about 40, including children, police said.

A dozen others died in attacks elsewhere in the country, including five policemen and five members of a powerful Shiite religious party.

The suicide attack occurred in a mostly Shiite eastern district of Baghdad as people lined up at a bank Monday morning to receive government checks to compensate for incomplete food rations.

Police Lt Ali Abbas said the attacker joined the line and blew himself up while security guards were searching people before allowing them to enter the bank.

Ten people were killed and at least 40 wounded, said Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Falah al-Mohammedawi.

The wounded included three children and nine women, Abbas said.

Elsewhere in Iraq, gunmen killed three brothers and two of their sons in an attack on a street in Baqouba, 35 miles north-east of Baghdad, police said. All five were identified as members of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country’s leading Shiite political party, police said.

A roadside bomb attack in Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, killed two policemen and wounded one, police said. Gunmen also shot dead a policeman protecting electricity generating facilities near a hospital in Baghdad’s Sadr City, police said.

In the volatile western city of Ramadi, insurgents killed a police colonel as he drove to work, said Lt. Mohsen al-Dulaimi. Drive-by gunmen also killed an Oil Ministry employee as he was driving in western Baghdad and another man in Karmah, 50 miles west of Baghdad, police said.

Three masked gunmen stormed into a restaurant in the nearby western city of Fallujah and shot dead a policeman as he was eating an evening meal, a hospital official said.

There has been a sharp increase in insurgent activity this month in Fallujah, the one-time insurgent stronghold that was targeted in a November 2004 US-led operation that flushed out militants from the city.

Iraq’s former electricity minister, Ayham al-Samarie, escaped injury when a roadside bomb exploded near his three-vehicle convoy in Baghdad, said police Lt Maitham Abdul-Razzaq. Two bodyguards were wounded.

The motive for the attack was not clear. Al-Samarie, a Sunni Arab political figure, was a member of the transitional government established after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime.