By Alistair Lyon
(Reuters)
BAGHDAD -- A suicide car bomber killed up to 12 Iraqis near a U.S.-Iraqi base in Baghdad on Sunday and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil servant and a university professor in a new spate of assassinations.
The U.S.-led administration has said insurgents may step up attacks before and after the occupation formally ends on June 30 to disrupt the handover and discredit Iraq's new government.
While the new bloodshed seemed to bear out that view, two foreign hostages, a Turk and an Egyptian, were freed after what a mediator called talks with men close to their captors.
Police at the scene of the car bombing said their colleagues had tried to stop a vehicle racing on the wrong side of the road toward an Iraqi military college in southeast Baghdad, where many U.S. soldiers are also based.
Abdul Razzak Kadhem, a senior police officer, said two police cars had intercepted the vehicle, which then exploded.
The U.S. military said the blast had killed eight Iraqi civilians and four police, and wounded 13 people.
Two charred bodies could be seen in the burned wreckage of one police car. All that remained of the bomber's car was a blackened engine in the road. Several civilian vehicles were damaged. Blood stained the driver's seat of a white pick-up.
"One car was blown across the street," said Abdel Hasan al-Jabbar, an off-duty civil defense worker. "The man inside had blood pouring from the top of his head."
Insurgents detonated another car bomb outside Taji, north of Baghdad, during an attack on U.S. troops, killing one American soldier and wounding two others. One attacker was killed when troops returned fire, an army spokeswoman said.
Targeted Killings
The Iraqi civil servant, Kamal al-Jarrah, 63, who headed the education ministry's cultural relations department, was shot in his garden in the western Ghazaliya district of the capital.
He died in hospital, an education ministry official said. Jarrah's wife, who was with him in the garden, was unhurt.
In a similarly precise attack on Saturday, gunmen in a car killed Bassam Qubba, a senior Foreign Ministry official.
Assassins also struck at Baghdad University, where they shot dead geography professor Sabri al-Bayati as he walked on a road just outside the campus on Sunday, university guards said.
Two Iraqis working for U.S.-funded Iraqi television network Al-Iraqiya were found dead near the Syrian border after they were killed on Saturday, colleagues said, adding that the motive for the attack was unclear.
Last month, a suicide bombing killed Izzedin Salim, the head of Iraq's now-dissolved Governing Council, and another council member survived an ambush south of the capital.
Tighter security measures offered to Iraq's top politicians and security officials since those attacks may have prompted insurgents to target less well-guarded lower-level figures.
Anti-U.S. forces in Iraq include Sunni insurgents, foreign Islamist militants and a Shi'ite militia led by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who launched an uprising in April.
Political Path
Sadr, who agreed a truce with U.S. forces and Iraqi authorities this month, now plans to create a political party that could contest elections due to be held by January under a U.N.-approved plan for Iraq's postwar political transition.
U.S. officials want Sadr excluded from politics, saying he should face Iraqi murder charges. Sadr says he is innocent.
While the truce has calmed violence in the southern holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, U.S. forces are still clashing with Sadr's fighters in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.
Three civilians and two militiamen were killed there in overnight gun battles, a spokesman for Sadr said.
The hostage mediator, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters the Egyptian and Turk had been freed on Sunday. Their captors had threatened to kill them if their governments did not denounce the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.
Anti-U.S. groups have abducted dozens of foreigners in Iraq. Most have been freed. Three, including a Lebanese national kidnapped last week, are known to have been killed.
In northern Iraq, gunmen killed Iyad Khorshid, a Kurdish religious leader, overnight in the latest of a series of murders in the ethnically divided city of Kirkuk, police said.
A former local official was also shot dead in his home and ambushers wounded six policemen on night patrol in Kirkuk.
(Additional reporting by Lin Noueihed, Michael Georgy and Mussab al-Khairalla in Baghdad and Adnan Hadi in Kirkuk)
(Reuters)
BAGHDAD -- A suicide car bomber killed up to 12 Iraqis near a U.S.-Iraqi base in Baghdad on Sunday and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil servant and a university professor in a new spate of assassinations.
The U.S.-led administration has said insurgents may step up attacks before and after the occupation formally ends on June 30 to disrupt the handover and discredit Iraq's new government.
While the new bloodshed seemed to bear out that view, two foreign hostages, a Turk and an Egyptian, were freed after what a mediator called talks with men close to their captors.
Police at the scene of the car bombing said their colleagues had tried to stop a vehicle racing on the wrong side of the road toward an Iraqi military college in southeast Baghdad, where many U.S. soldiers are also based.
Abdul Razzak Kadhem, a senior police officer, said two police cars had intercepted the vehicle, which then exploded.
The U.S. military said the blast had killed eight Iraqi civilians and four police, and wounded 13 people.
Two charred bodies could be seen in the burned wreckage of one police car. All that remained of the bomber's car was a blackened engine in the road. Several civilian vehicles were damaged. Blood stained the driver's seat of a white pick-up.
"One car was blown across the street," said Abdel Hasan al-Jabbar, an off-duty civil defense worker. "The man inside had blood pouring from the top of his head."
Insurgents detonated another car bomb outside Taji, north of Baghdad, during an attack on U.S. troops, killing one American soldier and wounding two others. One attacker was killed when troops returned fire, an army spokeswoman said.
Targeted Killings
The Iraqi civil servant, Kamal al-Jarrah, 63, who headed the education ministry's cultural relations department, was shot in his garden in the western Ghazaliya district of the capital.
He died in hospital, an education ministry official said. Jarrah's wife, who was with him in the garden, was unhurt.
In a similarly precise attack on Saturday, gunmen in a car killed Bassam Qubba, a senior Foreign Ministry official.
Assassins also struck at Baghdad University, where they shot dead geography professor Sabri al-Bayati as he walked on a road just outside the campus on Sunday, university guards said.
Two Iraqis working for U.S.-funded Iraqi television network Al-Iraqiya were found dead near the Syrian border after they were killed on Saturday, colleagues said, adding that the motive for the attack was unclear.
Last month, a suicide bombing killed Izzedin Salim, the head of Iraq's now-dissolved Governing Council, and another council member survived an ambush south of the capital.
Tighter security measures offered to Iraq's top politicians and security officials since those attacks may have prompted insurgents to target less well-guarded lower-level figures.
Anti-U.S. forces in Iraq include Sunni insurgents, foreign Islamist militants and a Shi'ite militia led by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who launched an uprising in April.
Political Path
Sadr, who agreed a truce with U.S. forces and Iraqi authorities this month, now plans to create a political party that could contest elections due to be held by January under a U.N.-approved plan for Iraq's postwar political transition.
U.S. officials want Sadr excluded from politics, saying he should face Iraqi murder charges. Sadr says he is innocent.
While the truce has calmed violence in the southern holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, U.S. forces are still clashing with Sadr's fighters in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.
Three civilians and two militiamen were killed there in overnight gun battles, a spokesman for Sadr said.
The hostage mediator, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters the Egyptian and Turk had been freed on Sunday. Their captors had threatened to kill them if their governments did not denounce the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.
Anti-U.S. groups have abducted dozens of foreigners in Iraq. Most have been freed. Three, including a Lebanese national kidnapped last week, are known to have been killed.
In northern Iraq, gunmen killed Iyad Khorshid, a Kurdish religious leader, overnight in the latest of a series of murders in the ethnically divided city of Kirkuk, police said.
A former local official was also shot dead in his home and ambushers wounded six policemen on night patrol in Kirkuk.
(Additional reporting by Lin Noueihed, Michael Georgy and Mussab al-Khairalla in Baghdad and Adnan Hadi in Kirkuk)
