Middle East News

At least 42 killed in Iraq (2nd Roundup)

Jun 26, 2008, 20:06 GMT

Baghdad - At least 42 people were killed and 62 wounded in separate attacks across Iraq, police sources and media reports said Thursday.

In Nineveh province, 17 people were killed when a car bomb aimed at provincial Governor Doreid Kashmola, went off in the centre of Mosul, police sources told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The blast left at least 62 people wounded.

Kashmola survived the explosion, while five of his security guards were among the wounded, sources said.

It was not the first time Nineveh's governor survived an assassination attempt.

The Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency reported there were two other explosions in Mosul on Thursday, leaving 4 people wounded, including a policeman.

In another incident, at least 20 people were killed when a suicide bomber targeted a meeting of clan chiefs and tribal leaders in the town of Karma in the western province of Anbar, al-Arabiya news channel said.

The attacker, who blew himself up while the council was meeting, managed to enter through an unguarded gate, al-Arabiya said.

Senior local officials and clan chiefs were reported to be among those killed, while US troops were believed to be among the injured.

The US military was expected to delay the handover of security responsibilities in Anbar province due to the explosion and bad weather forecasts, al-Iraqiya state television said.

The province is scheduled to become the first Sunni province to be transferred to Iraqi security control on Saturday. It will be the 10th of Iraq's 18 provinces to revert to Iraqi control. The previous nine have been Kurdish or Shiite.

Separately, the US military said one of its soldiers was killed by armour-piercing explosives in the predominantly Shiite area of eastern Baghdad, adding to latest in a surge of violence that saw at least nine soldiers killed this week.

The US military says the charges come from Iran.

The fatality pushes the number of soldiers who died in June to at least 26. Some 19 soldiers were killed in May.

In another news, the US military said its troops killed three 'criminals' after they were attacked by small arms fire near Baghdad International Airport about 8:40 am on Wednesday.

Iraqi officials were quoted as saying the victims were identified as employees of a bank at the airport, including a woman.

The incident is one of several recent episodes in which US and Iraqi officials have given contradictory accounts of what happened.

In a similar episode on Wednesday, witnesses told dpa that five Iraqis from the same family were killed in a US air strike on a house in the town of Tikrit. Iraqi officials confirmed the victims were civilians.

The US military said they had come under fire from an 'al-Qaeda terrorist' and called in air support when he refused to surrender.