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Four killed, five wounded in Iraq violence

27 June 2011 17:25 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Four people were killed and another five wounded in car bomb explosion and gunfire attacks in northern and eastern Iraq on Monday, police said, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

A booby-trapped car went off near a police patrol in Bazwaya area, just east of Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, killing three people and wounding three others, including two policemen, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The blast destroyed a police vehicle and caused damages to several nearby buildings, shops and civilian cars, the source said.

In Iraq’s eastern province of Diyala, gunmen on motorcycle shot dead a man and seriously wounded his son in al-Abbarah area of the provincial capital city of Baquba, some 65 km northeast of Baghdad, a provincial police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

In a separate incident, a local Awakening Council group member was wounded by gunmen in the town of Buhruz, some 10 km south of Baquba, the source said.

The Awakening Council group, or al-Sahwa in Arabic, are mainly anti-U.S. Sunni insurgent groups, who fought al-Qaida militant group after the latter exercised indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.

Also in the province, Iraqi security forces conducted search operations across the province during the past 24 hours and arrested 10 suspects, including four wanted al-Qaida militants, the source added.

Monday’s violence came amid tightened security measures by Iraqi authorities in Baghdad as hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims rally at the site of Imam Musa al-Kadhim mausoleum in Baghdad’s northern district of Kadhimiyah.

The Shiite major ritual, which culminates on Tuesday, is to commemorate the death of al-Kadhim, the seventh of the most revered 12 Shiite Imams who was poisoned to death while in prison in the year 977 AD, during the Abbasid era.