In a dawn strike yesterday, unidentified gunmen attacked the house of the police chief in Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad, killing his wife, two brothers and 11 guards, Diyala provincial police reported.
The attackers also abducted two sons and two daughters of police chief Colonel Ali Ahmed, police said. Ahmed wasn't home at the time, they said. The children's ages and other details of the attack were not immediately available.
Diyala Province, and especially the city of Baqubah, 60km northeast of Baghdad, has been torn by violence in recent weeks as al-Qaeda in Iraq and affiliated groups have battled Iraqi security forces, the US military and some local insurgent groups that have turned against al-Qaeda.
explosion
Later in the morning in southern Iraq, a parked minibus exploded at a bus terminal in the town of Qurna, and a hospital director said at least 16 people were killed and 32 wounded.
A witness, taxi driver Salim Abdul-Hussein, 35, said the blast damaged the terminal and many cars and surrounding shops, striking an area crowded each morning with farmers coming to town to shop and sell their produce and animals in Qurna, 375km to the south of Baghdad.
Major General Mohammed Hammadi, police chief in Basra, the provincial capital 100km to the south, said a minibus loaded with rockets, ammunition, C4 explosives and benzene blew up and caused a nearby car to explode in flames -- leading to an early report of two car bombs.
Police cordoned off the area and arrested two Egyptian suspects, he said.
Hammadi said eight people were killed and 28 wounded. Another police source, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to deal with the press, said 15 people were killed. At Qurna hospital, director Ali Qassim said by telephone the hospital had received 16 bodies from the explosions and 32 wounded.
soldier killed
In other violence, unknown gunmen speeding by in the northern city of Kirkuk shot and killed an Iraqi soldier, Adnan Mahmoud, as he drove with his two-year-old daughter at 6:30am yesterday. The child was also killed, said police Captain Jassim Abdullah.
In Baghdad, US Army artillery fired at least nine rounds yesterday morning into a Sunni Muslim-dominated farming area in the city's southwestern sections of Arab Jibor and Albu Aitha, police reported. A police officer, who asked for anonymity as he was not authorized to talk to media, said the shelling targeted "selective areas" where Sunni militants were active.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
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Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
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