Four killed, three injured in attacks in Mosul (Roundup)

Oct 21, 2009, 13:28 GMT

Baghdad - At least four people were killed and three injured in fresh violence in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Wednesday, police told the German Press Agency dpa.

Armed men burst into a family home and fatally shot a man and his wife in southern Mosul. Soon after, in the east of the city, gunmen fatally shot a man and his daughter in the district of al-Jazair, police said.

The same morning, three policemen were injured when a bomb detonated as their patrol passed through the neighbourhood of al-Kokjali.

Wednesday's violence, the latest in a near-daily series of fatal attacks in and around Mosul, came as Iraqi security forces arrested eight Syrian nationals west of the city for illegally entering the country.

Police told dpa the eight Syrians were arrested for entering the country illegally and for carrying falsified documents. The eight were being held in a nearby police station while Iraqi security services investigated the case.

Since the US-led invasion in 2003, Baghdad and Washington have repeatedly accused Damascus of not doing enough to curb the flow of fighters into Iraq.

Iraq and Syria withdrew their respective ambassadors from Damascus and Baghdad in August after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed Syria for a series of bombings in the Iraqi capital on August 19 that killed more than 100 people and destroyed much of the ministries of foreign affairs and finance.

Following that diplomatic spat, the Iraqi government announced in September it had allocated around nearly 450 million dollars to boost security along the Iraqi-Syrian border to prevent fighters from infiltrating the infiltration of fighters into the country.

Deputy Interior Minister Ahmed Ali al-Khafaji said the money would be spent on building new police stations and road networks on the borders, as well as alarm systems along the frontier.

Al-Khafaji said that roughly 1,000 kilometres of Iraq's borders with Syria and Iran would be covered by the new alarm systems by June 2010.