Car bomb kills 17 in Iraq

2005-02-12 20:22

Hilla, Iraq - Seventeen people were killed and 16 wounded on Saturday when a car bomb exploded in the town of Musayyib, south of Baghdad, police and medical sources said.

"Seventeen people were killed, including three policemen, and 16 wounded, three of them also policemen, in the explosion of a car bomb at 8.30am (05:30 GMT)," said the head of the general hospital in the nearby city of Hilla.

Police Lieutenant Mohammed Tamimi said the bomb, which blew up near a hospital and local council building, was not a suicide attack.

"Most of the victims are people who were heading to the hospital or to the headquarters of the local council," he said.

Musayyib is a mixed Shiite-Sunni town 100km south of Baghdad, on the edge of a violence-wracked area dubbed the "triangle of death".

On Friday, 14 people were killed in a suicide car bomb attack near a Shiite mosque in the town of Balad Ruz, northeast of Baghdad, while another seven were killed in an attack on Shiite-owned bakeries in the capital.

In violence elsewhere on Saturday, three Iraqis were killed and 26 wounded, security sources said.

They said an Iraqi judge who worked under the regime of former president Saddam Hussein was shot dead in the southern city of Basra.

"Judge Taha al-Amir was killed by armed men who opened fire on his car at 8.30am (05:30 GMT) in the Briha district," said Lieutenant Colonel Karim Zaidi, adding that the judge's driver was wounded in the attack.

One soldier was killed and another hurt in a mortar attack east of Dhuluiya, 70km south of Baghdad, while a civilian died in a roadside bomb attack targeting a joint Iraqi-US patrol outside Samarra, 125km north of Baghdad, the security sources said.

Another seven civilians were wounded in the bomb attack as they drove behind the patrol, said police Major Salim Mudhafar.

Other casualties included two police wounded in an attack on their patrol on the road between Tikrit, 180km north of the capital, and Tuz to the east, said Captain Ahmad Bayaneddin.

Five civilians were also wounded in Hawija, near the northern city of Kirkuk, when a homemade bomb exploded, said Kirkuk police chief Turhan Yussef, adding that three of the wounded were children in a serious condition.

In the Shiite city of Nasiriyah, 375km south of the capital, a fight broke out between two branches of the security services, wounding five on each side.

"An argument broke out between a policeman and a commando which degenerated into an exchange of fire between the two forces," said a security source.

Police in Kut, also in the Shiite zone south of Baghdad, said that they had killed an insurgent after opening fire on suspects.

- AFP