Saboteurs set ablaze oil pipelines in both northern and southern Iraq yesterday, threatening to further cripple the country's ailing economy and send world prices back upwards.
The attack on a pipeline near the southern port city of Basra came less than two days after the country's key revenue earner was dealt a serious blow by another act of sabotage in the north which halted all exports of Kirkuk crude.
Saboteurs also blew up a secondary pipeline serving the northern oil center of Kirkuk yesterday afternoon, a security official said.
In Basra, oil officials scrambled to contain the blaze and salvage the flow of exports.
"The sabotage damaged two parallel pipelines. The first pumps oil to the Harithah electrical plant and the second from the town of Nahr Omar to the Zubeir oil fields," South Oil Company chief executive officer Jabar Ali al-Luaibi said
A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb yesterday outside the Iraqi police academy in the northern city of Kirkuk as hun-dreds of trainees and civilians were leaving for the day, killing at least 17 people and wounding at least 32, authorities said.
Ambulances raced to the scene, where seven cars were on fire. Rescue personnel ferried the wounded away on stretchers.
The blast was caused by a suicide attacker, said Iraqi National Guard General Anwar Mohammed Amin.
Meanwhile, the militant Islamic Army in Iraq has claimed responsibility for an assassination attempt against Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, in a video shown yesterday by the Arabic-language satellite television network al-Jazeera.
The group, which is believed to have kidnapped two French journalists, also said it captured a bodyguard of Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, during the attack.
The Islamic Army in Iraq said in the video that "the hostage, who was wounded during the attempted assassination of Chalabi, died as a result of his wounds," al-Jazeera reported.
Meanwhile, Nepal yesterday urged its citizens in Iraq to leave the country after 12 Nepalese hostages were executed by insurgents.
The government briefly lifted a shoot-on-sight curfew imposed in the capital four days ago after news of the killings sparked riots.
Foreign Minister Prakash Sharan Mahat said it was unclear how many Nepalese were in Iraq, but the number was in the thousands, adding that the government was working to get its citizens out.
"We have even sought help from groups like the International Organization of Migration," Mahat said. "We have appealed to all the Nepalese in Iraq to come out of there without endangering themselves, and contact the embassies in neighboring countries."
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