At least 76 al-Qaeda suspects held in Iraq (Roundup)

Nov 11, 2007, 15:21 GMT

Baghdad - At least 76 suspected members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network were arrested on Sunday in raids on their hideouts in Iraq, security sources said.

In the town of Sarhaddin, 170 kilometres north of Baghdad, Iraqi troops arrested three key members of al-Qaeda in Iraq, one of whom is an Afghan and two are Sudanese, security sources said. Weapons were seized during the operation.

In the city of Baquba, a US-Iraqi army patrol was struck by a bomb that caused two fatalities, security sources said. Two more members of the patrol were wounded.

The Iraqi army backed by US forces launched a series of offensives to seek out members of al-Qaeda in villages near Baquba, 60 kilometres north-east of Baghdad, according to security sources.

The crackdown led to the arrest of 73 people, including a key member of al-Qaeda identified as Abu-Nijm al-Juburi. Weapons were also seized.

Also in Baquba, gunmen stormed the building of the technical institute and abducted two students. A third student was killed when the gunmen fired randomly on their way out of the building, witnesses said.

Three bodies were found in the Ghalibiyah area of Baquba. Two of the bodies were not immediately identified while the third was said to be that of a building contractor working on reconstruction projects.

In Diwanyah, four people were wounded and four killed, one of them in a US airstrike on residential buildings, in a fresh spate of violence in Iraq on Sunday, security sources and witnesses said.

US airstrikes launched overnight on residential buildings in districts of Diwaniyah, 280 kilometres south of Baghdad, left a civilian dead and two wounded and damaged buildings, according to witnesses.

The air raids targeted members of the Shiite Mahdi Army in the districts of al-Sadr and al-Nahda in the predominantly Shiite city of Diwaniyah.

Diwaniyah has been the scene of security offensives by Iraqi and US troops targeting loyalists of the radial Shiite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr.