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Anti-terror police chief killed in northern Iraq

07 September 2012 00:09 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. The chief of a local police anti-terror unit was killed Thursday in a bomb attack in northern Iraq, a provincial police source said, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

Colonel Ismail al-Jubouri, the chief of the anti-terror unit in the town of al-Sharqat, some 280 km north of the capital Baghdad, was killed when a sticky bomb attached to his car went off in the morning in the town, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Jubouri’s driver was also wounded by the blast, which took place while Jubouri was travelling to the Salahudin’s capital city of Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, the source said.

The attack came a day after armed men gunned down Amal Ahmad, a female judicial investigator, and a policeman while they were leaving a court building in the city of Tuz-Khurmato, some 90 km east of Tikrit.

On July 22, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the top leader of the self- styled Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), al-Qaida front in the country, launched a plan named "Breaking the walls" aimed at releasing Qaida prisoners and to target the country’s judges and investigators, as well as to return to the previous al-Qaida strongholds that had been evacuated after rifts with the then anti- U.S. Sunni militant groups.

Violence in Iraq has ebbed from its climax in 2006 and 2007, when sectarian conflicts pushed the country to the brink of a civil war, but tensions and sporadic shootings and bombings are still seen across the country.