More than 40 killed in fresh violence in Iraq
Pakistan Times Wire Service

BAGHDAD: More than 40 people were killed across Iraq Friday, including 15 who died when a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a Shiite mosque in Baghdad despite a security crackdown in the capital, police said.

The blast, which also wounded 25 people, came just an hour before the main weekly Muslim prayers, when the Baratha mosque would have been filled with thousands of worshippers.

Friday's blast came despite a security crackdown that saw vehicles banned from the capital's streets during prayer time and tens of thousands of Iraqi and US soldiers out on patrol.

The police were exploring the possibility that Friday's bombing could have been the work of a man dressed as a woman or as a cleric, the only way to escape security checks put up at the mosque since the April bombings.

Two people were also killed and 16 wounded when four mortar rounds struck a house and a shop in Baghdad's Sab al-Bur neighbourhood.

In Iraq's second city of Basra, gunmen shot dead a cleric and his bodyguard as they stood outside the Al-Basra Al-Kibeer mosque an hour before prayer in the southern part of the city, said police.

Gunmen in two trucks stormed two villages south of Baghdad in the early hours Friday and killed four people and kidnapped 10 others, police said.

In another incident, one person was killed and another kidnapped when men dressed in Iraqi army uniforms attacked a house in Al-Jahar village near the town of Madain, also just south of the capital.

"The gunmen stormed the house, dragged the two men out and killed one of them in front of the house and took away the other," a police officer said.
An Iraqi army soldier was also shot dead by gunmen in the northern town of Hawija, while an employee of the Northern Gas Company was similary shot dead near the oil city of Kirkuk, police said.

On Thursday night, 10 including a woman and her four children were killed in Baquba when a bomb went off in a neighbor's house bringing the ceiling down on the family sleeping in the garden, police said.●