Sep 25, 2009, 16:36 GMT
Baghdad - Nineteen Iraqis were killed and one was injured on Friday in separate attacks and explosions in and around the northern city of Mosul, security sources said.
'Two policemen were killed and one was injured during clashes between gunmen and Iraqi police in Yermuk area, west of Mosul,' a local police source told the German Press Agency dpa.
The source added that two civilians were shot and killed by unidentified gunmen in the al-Mithaq district.
Meanwhile, weapons and explosives due to be defused at Mount Bashiqa outside Mosul went off while in transport, killing immediately 15 Iraqi soldiers accompanying the cargo, local authorities and security sources told dpa. A high-ranking officer was among those killed.
The ordnance had been seized by the army during a military operation in the area, sources added.
Mosul is the capital city of Nineveh province and lies some 400 kilometres north of Baghdad.
Iraqi forces announced Friday the arrest of two more prisoners who escaped from an Iraqi prison earlier in the week. The authorities reported earlier Friday that four had been captured.
The arrest of the six, found in the cities of Samarra and Tikrit, bring the number of recaptured prisoners to seven, after forces arrested another escapee Thursday evening.
The search is still on for the remaining nine.
The 16 prisoners, all convicted of terrorist offences, had been housed in a prison in the northern city of Tikrit until they escaped from a bathroom window on Wednesday night.
Four of the 16 were 'linked to al-Qaeda' and faced death sentences. Three of those sentenced to death were among those recaptured, sources told dpa.
Investigation revealed that a prison guard helped the prisoners by supplying them with tools used to escape.
A high-ranking officer in the anti-terrorism department in police department in Salahaddin, where Tikrit is located, was sacked Thursday as a result of the escape.
A police source said the officer, Mohammad al-Juburi, had previously asked for more staff to ensure security in the prison, but that his request was denied.
Security authorities declared a curfew across Tikrit, and thousands of police and security personnel have been deployed there to track down the remaining escaped prisoners.
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