Coordinated bombings early yesterday shattered the homes of four police officers in the western Iraqi town of Heet, killing seven people including the town’s anti-terror chief, an official said.
Six people were wounded in the blasts.
Attackers planted explosives around the bedrooms of the policemen in the town, 60km west of the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi, said Lieutenant Colonel Fadhil Nimrawi, the head of the town’s emergency response unit.
“At 3am, men planted bombs around the bedrooms of four houses belonging to members of the police force, including Major Walid al-Heeti, the head of Heet’s anti-terror department,” he said. “The bombs killed seven people, including the anti-terror chief, and wounded six others, including women and children from the four families.”
The dead also included Heeti’s wife and mother, a child, and three other police officers, Nimrawi said.
The four houses were in different neighborhoods across the center of Heet and no vehicles are being allowed in or out of the town as part of ramped up security.
Nimrawi said several people had been arrested in connection with the attack, but declined to specify how many.
Heeti was one of the leaders of a campaign against al-Qaeda in mostly Sunni Anbar, which helped dramatically reduce the terror network’s presence in the province, Iraq’s biggest.
Several cities in Anbar were used as insurgent bases in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of 2003.
Since 2006, however, local Sunni tribes have sided with the US military and Iraqi authorities. Daily violence has dropped dramatically because al-Qaeda fighters have been ejected from the region.
Yesterday’s attacks come a month after the head of Salaheddin Province’s anti-terror squad and at least three of his bodyguards were among five people killed by a suicide bomber in Tikrit, the predominantly Sunni hometown of executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
IRAN OIL ROW
Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was in Baghdad yesterday for talks with Iraqi leaders over bilateral ties, officials said, just weeks after a dispute between the two countries over their border.
Mottaki, who last visited Iraq in September, was holding a press conference with his Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Zebari and was also due to meet with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi officials said.
Iranian TV said Mottaki was heading a large delegation on the visit.
Iran has often been accused by US military leaders, whose forces still have a large presence in Iraq, of funding and training Shiite militant groups and undermining security in the conflict-torn country.
Mottaki’s latest visit comes just weeks after Iran forces took over an oil well along the two countries’ disputed border, prompting a stand-off that drove up international crude prices.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS