IRAQ: A suicide car bomber killed up to 12 Iraqis near a US-Iraqi base in Baghdad yesterday and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil servant and a university professor in a new spate of assassinations.
The US-led administration has said insurgents may step up attacks before and after the occupation formally ends on June 30th to disrupt the handover and discredit Iraq's new government.
While the new bloodshed seemed to bear out that view, two foreign hostages, a Turk and an Egyptian, were freed after what a mediator called talks with men close to their captors.
Police at the scene of the car bombing said their colleagues had tried to stop a vehicle racing on the wrong side of the road towards an Iraqi military college in south-east Baghdad, where many US soldiers are also based.
Abdul Razzak Kadhem, a senior police officer, said two police cars had intercepted the vehicle, which then exploded.
The US military said the blast had killed eight Iraqi civilians and four police, and wounded 13 people.
Two charred bodies could be seen in the burnt wreckage of one police car. All that remained of the bomber's car was a blackened engine in the road. Several civilian vehicles were damaged.
"One car was blown across the street," said Abdel Hasan al-Jabbar, an off-duty civil defence worker. "The man inside had blood pouring from the top of his head."
Insurgents detonated another car bomb outside Taji, north of Baghdad, during an attack on US troops, killing one American soldier and wounding two others. One attacker was killed when troops returned fire, an army spokeswoman said.
The Iraqi civil servant Kamal al-Jarrah (63), who headed the education ministry's cultural relations department, was shot in his garden in the western Ghazaliya district of the capital.
He died in hospital, an education ministry official said.
Mr al-Jarrah's wife, who was with him in the garden, was unhurt. In a similarly precise attack on Saturday, gunmen in a car killed Bassam Qubba, a senior Foreign Ministry official.
Assassins also struck at Baghdad University, where they shot dead geography professor Sabri al-Bayati as he walked on a road just outside the campus yesterday, university guards said.
Two Iraqis working for US-funded Iraqi television network Al-Iraqiya were found dead near the Syrian border after they were killed on Saturday, colleagues said, adding that the motive for the attack was unclear.
Last month, a suicide bombing killed Izzedin Salim, the head of Iraq's now-dissolved Governing Council, and another council member survived an ambush south of the capital.
Meanwhile, radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who agreed a truce with US forces and Iraqi authorities this month, now plans to create a political party that could contest elections due to be held by January under a UN-approved plan for Iraq's post-war political transition.
US officials want al-Sadr excluded from politics, saying he should face Iraqi murder charges. Al-Sadr says he is innocent.