Suicide bomb, shootings kill 9 in northern Iraq
A suicide car bomb blast and other militant attacks
killed nine people in northern Iraq on Saturday, officials said, the
latest in a wave of violence that has killed nearly 2,000 Iraqis since
the start of April.
The deadliest attack was in
al-Athba village near the northern city of Mosul, when a suicide car
bomber rammed his explosives-laden car into a police patrol, a police
officer said. Three civilian bystanders and one policeman died while six
other people were wounded, he added.
With violence
spiking sharply in recent months to levels not seen since 2008, al-Qaida
in Iraq and other militant groups have been gathering strength in the
area of Mosul, some 360 km northwest of Baghdad.
In
the city of Tuz Khormato, 210 km north of Baghdad, gunmen on motorcycles
riddled a civilian vehicle carrying four off-duty policemen with
bullets, killing three and wounding another, a police officer said.
Another
group of gunmen attacked a police checkpoint in the city of Samarra,
killing two policemen and wounding four, another police officer said.
Samarra is 95 km north of Baghdad.
Police said two civilians were killed and nine wounded when a bomb ripped through a small market in Baghdad late on Friday.
Four
medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke
on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to release
information.
Also on Saturday, the United Nations
said 27 more residents of a camp housing members of an Iranian exile
group have been relocated to Albania. The move follows a deadly rocket
attack on the facility last week.
A total of 71
residents of Camp Liberty have now relocated to the southeast European
country, which has agreed to accept 210 of them. Germany has also
offered to take 100 residents. The U.N. is urging other member-states to
accept some of the more than 3,000 living in Iraq.
The
dissident group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq is the militant wing of a
Paris-based Iranian Opposition movement that opposes Iran’s clerical
regime and has carried out assassinations and bombings there. It fought
alongside Saddam Hussein’s forces in the 1980 - 88 Iran-Iraq war, and
several thousand of its members were given sanctuary in Iraq. It
renounced violence in 2001, and was removed from the U.S. terrorism list
last year.
Iraq’s Government wants the MEK members to leave, and the U.N. has been working to resettle them abroad.
Two
residents of Camp Liberty were killed in a June 15 rocket attack on the
facility. A Shiite militant group claimed responsibility, saying it
wants the group out of Iraq.
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