At least four killed, 16 injured, in fresh Iraq violence (Roundup)

Dec 29, 2009, 18:45 GMT

Baghdad/Mosul - At least four people were killed and 16 injured in fresh attacks in Baghdad and the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Tuesday, police said.

Two people were killed and 13 injured in a morning bomb blast near the Iraqi Ministry of Transport, police told the German Press Agency dpa.

A source at Baghdad's al-Bayina al-Jadida newspaper said the daily had been the target of that blast, which he told the Aswat al-Iraq news agency took place in a building behind the paper's offices.

Some 400 kilometres north of the capital, in the troubled city of Mosul, 'unknown gunmen' killed a civilian in the neighbourhood of al- Nour, to the east of the city, police told Aswat al-Iraq.

A young child was also injured in that shooting, police said.

Earlier, police told dpa that an Iraqi policeman had been killed and two others injured when a bomb planted by the side of the road exploded as their patrol passed through an eastern district of Mosul late Monday night.

Despite successive security pushes that police say have netted hundreds of suspected insurgents this year, Mosul and its environs remain the site of near-daily, deadly attacks.

Meanwhile, a criminal court in the Iraqi town of Rusafa on Tuesday sentenced three men to death for their roll in a June bombing that killed 88 people and injured 200 more outside a mosque in the northern Iraqi town of Taza, judicial spokesman Abdel-Satar al- Biraqdar said in a statement sent to reporters.

The attack, one of the worst to hit Iraq in the past year, came in the midst of a a wave of attacks across the country in the weeks before the US soldiers withdrew from cities and towns on June 30.