A suicide car bomber killed two Iraqis and wounded five yesterday in an attack on a police patrol in an area of Baghdad where insurgents had kidnapped and murdered a defense lawyer in former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's trial last week, police said.
The bomb exploded at 6:30am in the northeastern neighborhood of Shaab, killing two policemen and wounding three policemen and two civilians, police said.
In Kirkuk, 290km north of Baghdad, a roadside bomb exploded at 8:30am near a car carrying Ibrahim Zangana, a senior member of Iraq's Kurdish Democratic Party, seriously wounding him, killing one of his bodyguards and injuring another one.
On Sunday, more than 33 Iraqis died in a swell of violence in Iraq, including 12 laborers, five of them brothers, who were gunned down by insurgents at a construction site outside the city of Hillah, south of Baghdad, police said.
The toll among US service members in the Iraq war also was approaching 2,000 dead. But the US military said it has hampered insurgents' ability to unleash highly deadly suicide bombings with a series of offensives in western towns that disrupted militant operations.
Last Thursday, 10 gunmen wearing police and military uniforms kidnapped Sunni Arab Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, one of the defense lawyers in the trial of Saddam Hussein and seven former officials from his Sunni-dominated regime.
Al-Janabi, the lawyer for Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former head of Saddam's Revolutionary Court, was taken from his office in the Shaab area, and hours later his tortured and bullet-ridden body was found on a sidewalk by the Fardous Mosque in the nearby Ur neighborhood. The 12 remaining Saddam trial defense lawyers have since rejected an offer from the Interior Ministry for better security, demanding protection from US officials instead.
Also on Sunday, investigative judges took testimony from the first witness in the Saddam mass murder trial regarding the 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail. The judges went to a military hospital to take the deposition from Wadah Ismail al-Sheik, a cancer patient who was director of the investigation department at Saddam's feared Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the Dujail massacre. Al-Sheik is too sick to appear in court, and officials did not want to wait until the trial resumes Nov. 28 to get his testimony.
The US military on Sunday confirmed that four US contract workers were killed and two wounded in Iraq last month when their convoy got lost. The attack occurred on Sept. 20 when the convoy, which included US military guards riding in Humvees, made a wrong turn into the mostly Sunni Arab town of Duluiyah, north of Baghdad. Insurgents opened fire with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Three of the dead worked for Houston-based Halliburton Co's KBR subsidiary, the biggest US military contractor in Iraq. It was not clear who the fourth slain American worked for.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
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POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
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