Thaindian News

Baghdad, Nov 13 (IANS) Two people were killed and 16 others, including 13 Iranian Shiite pilgrims, were injured Sunday in separate gunfire and bomb attacks in central Iraq, police said.

A member of the local Awakening Council group was killed when a sticky bomb attached to his car detonated in the Abu Ghraib area, some 20 km west of Baghdad, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The blast also wounded a passer-by, the source said.

The Awakening Council group, or Sahwa in Arabic, consists of armed groups, including some powerful anti-US Sunni insurgent groups which fought Al Qaeda militants in the Sunni Arab areas after the US-led invasion of Iraq.

In the city of Samarra, some 120 km north of Baghdad, a policeman was shot dead during an operation in the city’s industrial area, a local police source said.

In Baghdad, a roadside bomb went off near a bus carrying Iranian Shiite pilgrims in the northern neighbourhood of Kadhmiyah, wounding 13 pilgrims aboard, an interior ministry source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Two Iraqis, who were accompanying the pilgrims in the bus, were also wounded by the blast, the source said.

Insurgents frequently attack Iranian pilgrims who flock in large numbers to Iraq to visit holy Shiite shrines since the US-led invasion in 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein’s Sunni regime and set up a Shiite-led government.

In Iraq’s eastern province of Diyala, Iraqi security forces captured an Al Qaeda leader in the provincial capital city of Baquba, some 65 km northeast of Baghdad, a source from Diyala’s operations command anonymously told Xinhua.

Also in the province, Iraqi security forces carried out search operations across the province during the past 24 hours and arrested seven suspects, including four wanted individuals, and found a cache of weapons, the source said.

Sporadic attacks are still common in Iraqi cities despite the dramatic decrease of violence over the past few years.