A surge of violent incidents in Iraq on Sunday claimed 10 lives
and wounded 40 others in Baghdad and other cities.
In one of the deadliest bombing in a busy parking lot of the
Shorjah area in the northern oil-city of Kirkuk, at least eight
people were killed and 25 others injured in a car bombing
explosion, a local police source said.
The blast occurred at about 3 PM (1200 GMT) in the Shorjaarea,
in which dozens of nearby shops, buildings and civilian cars were
also destroyed by the blast, Colonel Salih Muhammad told Xinhua by
telephone.
The ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, 250 km north of Baghdad,
has witnessed increasing tension, since the collapse of Saddam
Hussein regime in 2003, as Arab and Turkmen population in the city
are fighting Kurdish efforts to join the city to their autonomous
region just to the north.
In Baghdad's northern neighborhood of Kadhmiya, police said that
at least two people were killed and 13 others injured in another
car bomb explosion.
In Baya'a neighborhood, in southwestern the capital, police
source said that two civilians were wounded when a roadside bomb
went off near a passing US patrol in the al-Shariqa intersection in
the afternoon.
However, the US military did not confirm the incident yet.
Further northeast of Baghdad, seven Sunni and Shiite chieftains
from the volatile province of Diyala were abducted by unknown
gunmen in the Husseiniyah neighborhood after meeting top officials
in the office of the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, an
official from the provincial media office said.
These tribal leaders came to the al-Maliki's office to discuss
the national reconciliation efforts, the source added. Diyala
province, which stretches from the eastern edges of Baghdad to the
Iranian border to the east, has been the hot bed of insurgency and
sectarian violence since the US-led invasion in 2003.
Meanwhile, an anonymous police source said that Iraqi police
patrols have found, early in the day, five unidentified bodies
indifferent neighborhoods of Baghdad.
The bullet-riddled bodies were bounded and showing signs of
torture, the source added.
(Xinhua News Agency October 29, 2007)
