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Bicycle blast kills 26 Iraqi police

A suicide bomber on a bicycle killed 28 policemen at their base in the volatile Iraqi province of Diyala yesterday, police said, in one of the deadliest strikes on Iraq's security forces in months.

The bomber entered the base and attacked a group of policemen -- members of a rapid reaction force -- doing their morning exercises, said Major-General Ghanim al-Quraishi, police chief of Diyala province.

He said details of the bombing were confused because everyone at the scene had been killed or badly wounded.

The police base is in the city of Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province, where al-Qaeda and other Sunni Arab insurgent groups as well as Shiite Muslim militias operate.

At least 20 people were wounded in the attack, including a woman and a child, police said.

Mohammed al-Kirrawi, a doctor at the Baqubah general hospital, said most of the victims were struck by iron balls packed with the explosives to achieve maximum casualties.

He said the hospital lacked the necessary equipment to save many of the wounded.

"Among the wounded, there are seven in critical conditions and there is little hope that they will survive," he said.

car bomb

A car bomb in a residential area in the northern Iraqi town of Siniya also demolished two homes and killed seven people, police and health officials said. Eleven people were wounded, they said.

No group claimed immediate responsibility for the Baqubah bombing, but it bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda, which has often used suicide bombers in attacks on Iraqi security forces to devastating effect.

Al-Qaeda has vowed to step up attacks on the security forces as well as Sunni Arab tribal leaders and Sunni insurgents who have allied themselves with US forces in Diyala province to try to root out the Sunni Islamist group.

US and Iraqi forces launched a major offensive against al-Qaeda in Diyala province in June, regaining control of Baqubah and forcing many of the group's fighters to flee elsewhere.

That led to the creation of "concerned citizens groups" modeled on the tribal police units first formed in western Anbar. Tribal chiefs in the area have joined forces with US troops in an attempt to drive al-Qaeda from the province.

Al-Qaeda, however, has proved resilient and US military commanders warn that it still retains the capability to launch devastating attacks.

kidnapping

On Sunday, 10 anti-al-Qaeda tribal sheiks -- seven Sunnis and three Shiites -- from Diyala were kidnapped in a Shiite district of Baghdad while driving back home after a meeting with the government in the capital.

Baqubah's police chief was among 26 people killed last month when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a mosque compound where local Shiite and Sunni Arab leaders were holding reconciliation talks.

The US military has poured 30,000 extra troops into Iraq as part of US President George W. Bush's new Iraq strategy to create a more stable security environment for the country's feuding leaders to reconcile their warring sects.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in sectarian violence between majority Shiites and minority Sunni Arabs since February last year, when bombers blew up a revered Shiite shrine in the town of Samarra, north of Baghdad.

The second-ranking US general in Iraq, Lieutenant-General Raymond Odierno, said last week that violence had dropped to its lowest level since January last year.
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