A spate of bomb attacks in and around Baghdad yesterday morning killed six people, including four policemen, and wounded 24 others, security officials said.
In the deadliest explosion, a suicide car bomb outside a police station killed four policemen and two civilians and wounded 12 other police officials in al-Amil district, in the south of the capital.
The blast occurred at around 8am, officials from the interior and defense ministries said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
And in central Baghdad’s Allawi neighborhood, an electrical engineer was killed when a magnetic “sticky bomb” attached to his car detonated. Two others were wounded in the attack, the interior ministry official said.
Two other people were wounded in a roadside bomb targeting a police convoy in Baghdad Jadidah (“New Baghdad” in Arabic), in the west of the city.
And in Mahmudiyah, 30km south of the capital, eight people were wounded in another roadside bomb attack near the town’s municipal council offices.
Iraqi government figures showed that 337 people were killed as a result of violence last month, the fourth time this year where the overall death toll has been higher than the same month last year.
In other developments, attackers dressed in military uniforms on Saturday gunned down a politician aligned with the secular coalition that won the most seats in Iraq’s elections in March, the police said. He was the second candidate from the bloc to be killed in northern Iraq since the vote.
The politician, Faris Jassim al-Jabbouri, belonged to Iraqiya, the electoral list led by Ayad Allawi, that won a narrow victory over a coalition loyal to the country’s prime minister.
Though Jabbouri, a retired colonel and pilot, ran unsuccessfully, his allies in Iraqiya still described the killing as a politically motivated crime, involving as many as 20 gunmen hunting for Jabbouri in his hometown, about 24km from Mosul.
Last month, Bashar Mohammed Hamid, a 35-year-old Sunni mill owner who had won a seat, was assassinated while holding a meeting at his office in Mosul.
Political killings have become almost common, especially in the troubled region around Mosul in northern Iraq. Some politicians, though, worry that the long deadlock over a new government that has followed the election may worsen the strife, tempting some groups to deploy violence as another means of leverage in negotiations.
After Jabbouri’s killing, Iraqiya officials again demanded that the government take steps to provide some sort of protection for its candidates. Parliament has yet to be seated in Baghdad, though under the Constitution, it must convene within the next 10 days.
“Members of parliament have had to stay inside their homes for two months now, and no one is getting any security protection from either the police or the army,” said Nabel Harbo, a candidate from Allawi’s list who was elected in Mosul.
“I expect it to get worse,” he said.
Relatives of Jabbouri, 40, said the gunmen killed him around 2am in the town of Mawali. Some accounts said they arrived in pickups, often used by the police, though Haider al-Mulla, a spokesman for Iraqiya, said the vehicles did not have official markings.
Nineveh Province Governor Atheel al-Nujaifi said the 20 gunmen went door to door, led by a masked guide, searching for Jabbouri’s house.
Once there, a man wearing a lieutenant’s uniform insisted that the men be allowed to search his home, Jabbouri’s brother, Faez, said. Jabbouri’s son, Jasim, said his father then came downstairs, shouting that he was a politician with Iraqiya.
“We know,” his son recalled the men saying.
They then disarmed and bound Jabbouri’s brother and son and took Jabbouri outside.
“Then I heard gunshots,” his brother said.
Mulla declined to blame anyone for the attack in a region where insurgents remain a presence.
But, he said, “Iraqiya is being targeted.”
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