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Iraq insurgents kill top police, hit US convoy
Gunmen killed three high-ranking Iraqi police officers in two separate attacks on Saturday, among a daily round of bombings and ambushes targeting US forces and their Iraqi allies.
A powerful explosion rocked the northern city of Mosul in late afternoon but it remained unclear what the target or cause was as the U.S. military sealed off the area.
A car bomb exploded in the center of the ethnically divided northern oil capital of Kirkuk, badly damaging a U.S. Humvee patrol vehicle and wounding two soldiers and an interpreter, the U.S. military said. The wounded were in a stable condition.
In southern Baghdad, gunmen assassinated a police brigadier and a colonel, a police source said, while west of Kirkuk near the town of Ash Sharqat a police colonel was one of two officers killed in an ambush. A second colonel, who reported the incident, was among three policemen wounded.
In a separate attack near Kirkuk, a policeman was wounded by a roadside bomb.
In Mosul, where the Sunni Arab insurgency has been particularly active in the past month, U.S. armored vehicles sealed off part of the west of the city and jets flew overhead after the loud explosion late in the day.
Earlier in the city, a car bomb exploded near a U.S. military convoy wounding at least two passersby, witnesses and the U.S. army said.
Security officials and civil servants have become prime targets for insurgents opposed to the U.S. military occupation and to Iraqis working for the U.S.-backed authorities. There are fears violence may increase before an election on Jan. 30.
A bomb damaged an office for election workers in the town of Zab, southwest of Kirkuk, wounding a civilian, police said.
Four employees of the Education Ministry were wounded when the bus taking them to work in Baghdad was raked by gunfire.
A civilian motorist was wounded on the main highway between Hilla and Kerbala, south of the capital, when a roadside bomb went off, missing a convoy of National Guards, police said.
KIRKUK TENSIONS
In Kirkuk, U.S. troops and Iraqi police sealed off the area where the car bomb exploded. Master Sergeant Robert Powell, a spokesman for U.S. forces in the area, said it was believed to have been remotely detonated and not a suicide bomb attack.
Close to the same spot, the provincial governor of Kirkuk, an ethnic Kurd, survived an assassination attempt when a car bomb exploded near his convoy a month ago. At least 16 people were wounded in that attack on Nov. 11.
Kirkuk is the center of Iraq's northern oil industry. Tension has risen between Arabs, Kurds and Turkish-speaking Turkmen since Saddam Hussein was toppled last year.
At Ash Sharqat, Colonel Mohammed Abed said from his hospital bed that a fellow police colonel and another officer were killed in the ambush which left Abed and two others wounded.
"They blocked our way, shot us and took our cars," he said.
A police source said the brigadier and colonel killed in Baghdad both worked at the Interior Ministry. A woman who survived the attack on the Education Ministry bus said in hospital: "We were on our way to work. We go the same way every day." Two men and two women were wounded. The yellow, unmarked city bus was riddled with bullet holes. |
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