Bus passengers murdered in Iraq

A group of gunmen in two cars attacked a minibus in Iraq today, killing seven passengers, including a child, police said.

The minibus was heading to Baghdad from a Shiite town north of the capital.

It left the town of Khalis and was near the violence-wracked city of Baqouba, 35 miles north-east of Baghdad, when it was ambushed outside the town of Hibhib, police said.

The attack highlights the sectarian violence and instability that continues to plague Diyala province north of Baghdad despite the 3-month-old security crackdown in Baghdad and the surrounding areas.

In western Baghdad, a roadside bomb detonated near a group of Iraqi soldiers patrolling the Sunni-dominated Adil neighbourhood in western Baghdad today, killing three of the soldiers and injuring two others.

In the confusion of the attack, the soldiers fired near the office of Adnan al-Dulaimi, the leader of parliament’s largest Sunni Arab bloc, the Iraqi Accordance Front, according to his office. No one was injured in the shootings.

The stepped-up US and Iraqi patrols of the capital during the crackdown have left the troops more vulnerable to attack by insurgents, military officials say.

The US military reported yesterday that six US soldiers on patrol in Baghdad were killed in a roadside bombing along with their interpreter on Saturday. A seventh soldier died in a blast on Saturday in Diwaniya, a mostly Shiite city 80 miles south of the capital, where radical Shiite militias operate.

Those deaths brought the number of American troops killed in Iraq since Friday to at least 15 – eight of them in Baghdad. So far, at least 71 US troops have died in Iraq this month – most of them from bombs.

Three more US soldiers remain missing after an ambush south of Baghdad that killed four other soldiers and their interpreter. Thousands of soldiers continued combing through fields and questioning suspects as the search for the men continued today.

As part of the ongoing attacks, a mortar shell exploded this afternoon on the roof of Iraq’s parliament building in the Green Zone compound in Baghdad, causing no injuries, said lawmaker Sabah al-Saadi.

“The shell landed almost above the office of the parliament speaker,” said al-Saadi, who was at a committee meeting inside at the time. He said there was minor damage to the roof. An April 12 suicide bombing in the parliament building’s dining hall killed one politician.

A few hours later several more mortar rounds were fired. Some of them landed in the Green Zone, but there were no reports of casualties, the US Embassy said.

Today’s blasts were part of a sharp increase in recent weeks of mortar attacks on the Green Zone, which houses the US Embassy, the Iraqi parliament and other government offices. The compound, on the banks of the Tigris River, is surrounded by cement walls and patrolled by US and Iraqi soldiers as well as private security guards.