Insurgents kill 15 in Iraq

2008-04-02 17:17

Baghdad - Insurgents killed at least 15 people and wounded several others in a spate of bombings and shootings across Iraq on Wednesday, officials said.

Four people were killed and four more kidnapped at a fake checkpoint near the central town of al-Dhuluiyah, in Salaheddin province, police said.

In the province of Diyala, insurgents killed six people, including three Iraqi security personnel, police said.

The three security guards were killed in a roadside bomb attack in the town of Mandeli, east of the provincial capital of Baquba, police Major Mohammed al-Kharki said.

The others killed were two policemen and a woman in separate roadside bomb attacks in and around the provincial capital of Baquba, police added.

In Baghdad, several armed men fired at a civilian car on Wednesday and killed two women working for Iraqna mobile telephone company, a security official said.

Three people were killed and 13 others wounded, including a cameraman with Iraq's independent al-Diyar satellite television, in a roadside bombing in Baghdad, officials said.

A security official said the bomb exploded in the eastern neighbourhood of Talbiyah and killed three people.

The cameraman survived but lost a leg, news editor Imed al-Abadi of the station told AFP.

He was walking down a street on his way to cover violence between Shi'ite militiamen and Iraqi and US forces when the attack occurred.

Ibrahim is being treated in Imam Ali hospital in Sadr City, the sprawling bastion of the Mahdi Army militia of powerful Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr that bore the brunt of violence this week.

The station has asked for him to be transferred to a more sophisticated facility in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, Abadi said.

The Paris-based media watchdog, Reporters Without Borders, meanwhile, has called for the release of Ahmed Mahmud Hassan, a journalist for al-Sumariya satellite television channel.

It said Hassan was arrested on March 30 in Mahmudiyah, 30km south of Baghdad, "while covering clashes between Iraqi forces and rebel insurgents".

The journalist is thought to be detained at a military base, Reporters Without Borders said.

"A score of journalists have been arrested across Iraq since the start of 2008," it said. "Arbitrary arrest has become commonplace in Iraq. The Iraqi authorities must stop this growing obstruction to the work of the media."

According to the Iraqi Journalists Freedom Observatory (JFO), which monitors violence against the media, 233 Iraqi and foreign journalists and media workers have been killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion of March 2003.

- SAPA