Bomb carnage kills 42 across Iraq

Two Iraqi suicide car bombers trying to murder a local police chief and a US-supporting Sunni leader killed at least 18 people today.

The attacks were the deadliest in a series of bombings in recent days as fanatics stepped up their promised Ramadan offensive.

Parked car bombs also rocked Baghdad as a total of at least 42 people were killed or found dead across Iraq.

In separate attacks in Beiji, an oil hub 155 miles north of Baghdad, bombers drove a minibus packed with explosives into the house of a local police chief and detonated an explosives-packed 4X4 outside the home of a leading member of a group of Iraqis who have turned against extremists in the area.

Both survived, Iraqi official said.

A Sunni mosque about 100 yards away from the police chief’s house was heavily damaged and three of its guards were among the dead.

Another 28 people were wounded and six houses destroyed in the blasts, which were 500 yards apart and within minutes of each other.

Beiji is in the Sunni province of Salahuddin, which along with the vast Anbar province to the west is part of Iraq’s Sunni heartland.

In Baghdad the first parked car bomb exploded in a commercial area in the Khulani district, killing at least eight people and wounding 25, including four traffic policemen.

Bystanders rushed to help the wounded, pulling victims from burning cars and loading bodies on carts as black smoke billowed into the air and a call to prayer resounded from the nearby Shiite Khulani mosque, itself a target of a truck bombing in June that killed 87 people.

Another car bomb killed two people and wounded 16 in the predominantly Shiite neighbourhood of Shaab.

A third car, parked by shops in the eastern neighbourhood of Binok, exploded later, killing five people.

Drive-by shooters also killed the deputy police chief in Mosul, 225 miles north-west of Baghdad.

A roadside bomb ripped through and outdoor market near a bus station in Joist Diyala on Baghdad’s south-eastern outskirts, killing two civilians and wounding 10 others.

In the southern neighbourhood of Sadiyah, gunmen in a speeding car shot a Shiite father and his two sons as they were leaving their home.

The bullet-riddled bodies of three men in their 30s also were found on a road in Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, apparent victims of so-called sectarian death squads largely run by Shiite militias.