A roadside bomb exploded at the entrance to a tunnel in central Baghdad yesterday targeting a US military convoy, police said. At least 29 civilians were wounded, medical officials said.
Nine people were killed in other insurgent attacks, eight of them shot dead in Baghdad, police said.
The explosion occurred as the convoy was about to enter the tunnel in Bab Shargi, near the city's central Tahrir Square, police Captain Abdul-Hussein Munsif said. He said two Humvees appear to have been damaged.
An emergency services official said on customary condition of anonymity that 29 wounded civilians were taken to two hospitals.
The bomb left a meter-wide crater in the ground. Charred parts from the armored Humvee littered the explosion site.
Five people were killed when gunmen opened fire as they left a city hospital where they had been to see the body of a Sunni cleric, slain on Monday night.
Iraqi police Colonel Mizher Hamad Yussef was machine-gunned to death from a passing car in east Baghdad as he left home for work.
And two employees of the finance ministry were shot dead on their way to work in Baghdad.
In another incident, a civilian was killed and five wounded, four of them policemen, when a suicide car bomber attacked a police patrol in the centre of Baquba, 60km northeast of Baghdad, police said.
Meanwhile, Iraqi members of parliament (MPs) negotiated on items holding up the completion of a new constitution.
Unresolved issues include federalism and how it will work, the boundaries of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, whether Kurdish should be an official language nationwide alongside Arabic, and what role Islam should play in the constitution.
There is also disagreement on how government revenues should be shared between the federal government and the regions.
MPs also blasted Kuwait in a live TV broadcast for what they say are their neighbor's repeated violations of Iraq's southern border.
Kuwaitis have destroyed the sand berm marking the border between the two countries and "penetrated one kilometer inside Iraqi territory," said Jawad al-Maliki, who heads the parliamentary committee in charge of defense and security.
The charges come on the 15th anniversary of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
"They have also crossed the border to install oil derricks on our agricultural land, have destroyed buildings in [the border town of] Umm Qasr with bulldozers and installed new border demarcations," he said.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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