Baghdad bus bombing kills five (Roundup)

Jun 8, 2009, 14:49 GMT

Baghdad - Five Iraqi civilians were killed and 18 others injured when a bomb attached to a public bus exploded in Baghdad on Monday, an Iraqi military spokesman said.

In a statement sent to reporters on Monday, General Qassim Atta said a sticky bomb had been placed on the inside of a wheel of the bus in the Baghdad district of Abu Dashir on Monday morning.

Several women and children were among those injured when the bomb detonated, he said.

Also on Monday, Iraqi security forces announced that they were reducing the curfew on Baghdad to the hours between midnight and 04:00.

In a sign of the improved security, Baghdad residents have in recent months returned to the streets late at night.

Monday morning's Baghdad bombing followed continued violence in the northern city of Mosul the previous night when two Iraqis died in a gun battle in the city's south in what police there described as 'a tribal dispute.'

In the east of the city, police arrested three men wanted on suspicion of belonging to the Sunni insurgent group, the Islamic State in Iraq, an umbrella organisation encompassing al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Police told the German Press Agency dpa that they had found a large cache of weapons and ammunition when they made the arrest.

Those arrests followed the fatal shooting of a police officer in the city on Sunday, and the abduction of the fourth civilian from a Christian district in the east of the city in less than 24 hours, police said, though it was not clear if the arrests were connected to the abductions or the officer's murder.

Mosul and its environs are among the most religiously and ethnically diverse areas of Iraq, and among the most prone to violence, despite successive security pushes that police say have netted hundreds of insurgents.