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Iraq car bombs kill 5, wound dozens

19 June 2010 03:02 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Car bombs in the restive Iraqi provinces of Kirkuk and Diyala killed five people and wounded dozens on Friday, police said, underscoring tensions simmering since an inconclusive March election, APA reports quoting â€œReutersâ€.
A bomb in a parked car in the northern town of Tuz Khurmato, part of Kirkuk province, exploded near the house of a provincial government official on a residential street, killing five and wounding 45, a police source said.
The disputed region of Kirkuk sits at the heart of a struggle between Iraq’s majority Arabs and minority Kurds over land, wealth and power.
In Baquba, part of Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, another car bomb wounded at least 30 people, hospital sources said, when it exploded near a police captain’s house, shattering windows of neighboring homes. Six members of the captain’s family were among the wounded.
Overall violence in Iraq has dropped sharply since the all-out sectarian warfare of 2006-7, but shootings and bombings -- often targeting police, government officials or former Sunni insurgents who switched sides -- are still common.
Sectarian tensions have simmered since an inconclusive election in March that pitted a Sunni-backed cross-sectarian alliance against the country’s major Shi’ite-led political groups. No one won outright, producing a prolonged period of political negotiations over forming a coalition government.
North of Baghdad, in the mainly Sunni city of Samarra, an Iraqi interpreter for U.S. soldiers, Hameed al-Daraji, was shot dead on Thursday by his son and nephew on the orders of a Sunni Islamist insurgent group that considered him a traitor, police said on Friday.
His son and nephew, working with the militant group Ansar al-Sunna, were let into the home 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad in the early hours of Thursday morning by another of Daraji’s sons, who was arrested by police and confessed, a police investigator told Reuters.
The nephew was also arrested but the other son escaped.
"They confessed they had killed him on the orders of the Ansar al-Sunna organization," said the investigator, who asked not to be named.
"He (Daraji) had been warned several times by armed groups to stop working with the Americans but he stayed in his job."
Ansar al-Sunna is affiliated with Sunni Islamist al Qaeda, and has been blamed for a number of deadly bomb blasts, abductions and killings since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Separately on Friday, three people were killed and seven wounded when a rocket fired at a U.S. base landed on three houses in Falluja, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad, hospital and police sources said.