For the second time in a week, suspected insurgents set off a bomb near a bridge in southeastern Baghdad yesterday, killing two civilians and wounding five, police said.
Last Friday, an insurgent drove a large fuel truck toward a checkpoint at the new Diyala Bridge and blew up his vehicle, killing about a dozen people, police said.
The bridge, which crosses the Diyala River, a Tigris tributary, was also damaged, setting fire to police and civilian cars that had been driving across during the attack.
Since then, the crossover has been closed to traffic, and Iraqis have been walking across it, toward central Baghdad, many to board buses and continue their travels.
roadside explosives
At 7:30am yesterday, a roadside bomb exploded near the entrance to the bridge, killing at least two Iraqi pedestrians and wounding five, police said on condition of anonymity out of concern for their own security.
New information also emerged about several attacks in Iraq on Wednesday.
At 6pm on Wednesday, about 10 gunmen hijacked a bus in Baqubah that was traveling from Baghdad to Kirkuk in northern Iraq, police said.
The attackers took 20 women and an unknown number of children off the vehicle, then left with 23 male passengers as hostages, apparently heading toward a nearby stronghold believed to be used by al-Qaeda in Iraq, police said.
An apparently coordinated attack by five suicide car bombers and scores of militants backed by mortars and bombs killed four policemen in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Wednesday night and injured 30 other people, including 14 police officers, police said.
other attacks
The attacks began after 7pm, when two suicide bombers detonated car bombs near the police station in Mosul, 360km northwest of Baghdad.
Two other suicide car bombers blew up near the headquarters of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan in another area of town, provincial chief of police Wathiq al-Hamdani said.
Another suicide car bomber targeting police was shot by guards before he could reach his target, al-Hamdani said.
The militants followed their attacks with mortar blasts, police patrols came under attack from roadside bombs and nearly 250 militants deployed throughout the city during the violence, he said.
The series of attacks killed four police and wounded 30, police said.
Police fought back, killing 15 militants, al-Hamdani said.
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