16 dead, 14 wounded in Baghdad attacks
Posted: 30 July 2010 0230 hrs

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BAGHDAD: Sixteen people, including nine security force members, were killed and 14 wounded on Thursday in a string of attacks in the Iraqi capital's Sunni district of Al-Adhamiyah, the interior ministry said.

Assailants set ablaze the bodies of three soldiers in Al-Adhamiyah after shooting them dead, the ministry said.

Three homemade bomb attacks on different routes to the scene of the shooting killed 13 more people, including three soldiers and three policemen, and wounded 14, among them seven police and two civil defence members, it said.

The ministry said the attacks all took place within a 15-minute time frame.

Gunmen raised Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia's black flag in a street in the middle of Al-Adhamiyah following the attacks, an Iraqi army officer and eyewitnesses said.

Also on Thursday, three soldiers were killed and 12 wounded when an insurgent detonated a car bomb near an army base in Al-Sharqat, north of Baghdad in Salaheddin province, a police officer said.

And in the former rebel bastion of Fallujah, west of the capital, one soldier was killed and five people wounded, including three soldiers, by a bomb on a parked motorcycle near an army checkpoint, an army officer said.

He said five people were wounded, including three policemen, by a roadside bomb targeting another checkpoint in Fallujah.

And a sticky bomb targeted the convoy of a police chief from Al-Qayar, 50 kilometres from the northern city of Mosul, killing a policeman and wounding two others, Mosul police said.

Mosul has remained a hotbed of insurgent activity even as levels of violence have decreased in other areas of Iraq.

US and Iraqi officials have warned of the dangers of an upsurge in violence as negotiations on forming a new governing coalition drag on, more than four months after the country held a parliamentary election.

Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda's front group in Iraq said it carried out this week's car bomb attack on Saudi-funded Al-Arabiya television's offices in Baghdad that killed four people.

The Islamic State of Iraq "claimed responsibility for the July 26th suicide bombing that struck the offices of Al-Arabiya Television in Baghdad," the SITE monitoring group said, citing a statement on jihadist web forums.

- AFP/de