IRAQ: A suicide bomber blew himself up among a group of Iraqi army recruits in northern Iraq yesterday, killing 25 people and wounding 35, as Sunni Muslims protested in Baghdad against alleged government torture.
Police said the attack occurred outside a municipal building in Rabia, a town 80km (50 miles) northwest of Mosul, Iraq's third largest city and a focus of an 18-month-old insurgent campaign against US-backed Iraqi security forces.
The al-Qaeda group in Iraq said in an internet statement it carried out the attack.
"A lion in a martyrdom brigade of al-Qaeda in Iraq carried out a heroic operation in Rabia with an explosive belt," said the statement posted on an Islamist website often used by militants in Iraq. It was not possible to authenticate the claim.
Separately, American and Iraqi forces killed nine guerrillas, five of them Syrians, in a small village northwest of the capital, a US military statement said.
The guerrillas had fired rocket-propelled grenades and small arms at a joint US and Iraqi patrol, prompting US forces to respond with an air strike, the statement said.
Hours after the blast in Rabia, a car bomb intended for a police patrol killed two Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, police said. A car bomb attack on a US military patrol in Mosul killed a child and wounded 11 civilians, police said.
Witnesses said the car bomb targeted a man selling alcohol on a cart. Islamic militants have previously attacked sellers of alcohol, which is banned under Islam.
In recent months, Iraq's Shia and Kurdish leaders have succeeded in drawing more Sunni Arabs into the political process in a bid to defuse the insurgency.
After staging a six-day boycott over the killing of a colleague, prominent Sunni Arabs resumed work on the committee drawing up Iraq's constitution this week, a process seen as the best chance for a peaceful solution to the fighting.
But the violence has continued unabated and Sunni Arab emotions boiled over on the streets of Baghdad yesterday, amid fears that tensions between the Sunni and Shia communities could spill over into civil war.
Over 1,000 Sunni protesters accused the government of pursuing sectarian policies and torturing and killing in "the new Iraq of fire and steel".
The protest took place outside the heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses the Iraqi government and western embassies.
"No to the sectarian practices of the Iraqi security forces," read one banner.
Iraqi leaders hope putting Saddam on trial will weaken his supporters in the insurgency, even though his capture in December 2003 did not.
The Iraqi special tribunal which will try him released yesterday photographs of the ousted leader, a Sunni, being questioned on the suppression of Shias following an uprising in 1991, after US forces drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.The photographs were taken in Baghdad on Thursday, the tribunal said.
Saddam has been formally charged with the killing of Shias in the village of Dujail in 1982 but no date has been set for his trial.