Baghdad, Oct 21 (DPA) At least 10 people were killed and 28 injured in fresh violence across Iraq Wednesday, police told DPA.
In the contested, northern city of Kirkuk, a roadside bomb killed journalist Orhan Hajran and injured television journalist Mohammed Abdallah as they returned to their house in the city, police said.

The attack came as lawmakers postponed until Sunday further debate on the country’s electoral law over a dispute on voter registration in the city.

Arab and Turkman lawmakers have sought to examine reports of irregularities in the voter-registration rolls. Kurdish lawmakers have agreed to examine the rolls only if similar investigations are made into other districts.

Many Iraqi Kurds hope to make Kirkuk, with its nearby oilfields, the capital of a future independent state. Arab Iraqi politicians, allied with representatives of Kirkuk’s sizeable Turkman minority, regard the city and its environs as an integral part of the country.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has called the dispute the most serious issue facing Iraq today.

Violence also continued Wednesday near the central Iraqi city of Hilla, some 100 km south of Baghdad.

Two people were killed when a car bomb exploded in an industrial area of Mahawil, not far from Hilla, police there told DPA. At least 12 others were injured in that explosion.

Soon after, at a sheep market in nearby al-Askandariyah, a bomb injured at least 11 people, police said.

Wednesday’s bombings followed a bomb attack targeting a police patrol in nearby al-Hamiya the day before. That blast left one police officer killed and three others injured, Baghdad’s Aswat al-Iraq news agency reported.

Some 500 km to the north, in Mosul, insurgents continued their campaign against police and government interests Wednesday.

A four-year-old boy was shot dead by a stray bullet when gunmen attacked a police patrol in the Mosul neighbourhood of al-Rashidiya, police there told DPA. A policeman was also killed in that attack.

Armed men burst into a family home and fatally shot a man and his wife in southern Mosul. Soon after, in the east of the city, gunmen fatally shot a man and his daughter in the district of al-Jazair, police said.

Across town, in the district of al-Mathna, two policemen were killed when gunmen opened fire on their patrol, police said.

Earlier Wednesday, three policemen were injured when a bomb detonated as their patrol passed through the neighbourhood of al-Kokjali.

Wednesday’s violence, the latest in a near-daily series of fatal attacks in and around Mosul, came as Iraqi security forces arrested eight Syrian nationals west of the city for illegally entering the country.

Police told DPA the eight Syrians were arrested for entering the country illegally and for carrying falsified documents. The eight were being held in a nearby police station while Iraqi security services investigated the case.

Since the US-led invasion in 2003, Baghdad and Washington have repeatedly accused Damascus of not doing enough to curb the flow of fighters into Iraq.

Iraq and Syria withdrew their respective ambassadors from Damascus and Baghdad in August after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed Syria for a series of bombings in the Iraqi capital Aug 19 that killed more than 100 people and destroyed much of the ministries of foreign affairs and finance.

Following that diplomatic spat, the Iraqi government announced in September it had allocated around nearly $450 million to boost security along the Iraqi-Syrian border to prevent fighters from infiltrating into the country.

Deputy Interior Minister Ahmed Ali al-Khafaji said the money would be spent on building new police stations and road networks on the borders, as well as alarm systems along the frontier.

Al-Khafaji said that roughly 1,000 km of Iraq’s borders with Syria and Iran would be covered by the new alarm systems by June 2010.