Insurgents killed at least 32 people across Iraq on Thursday, 24 of them security men, security officials said. Gunmen killed six policemen when they opened fire on a police station in BaghdadÂ’s upscale Mansur district, a security official said. Three policemen attached to the Ministry of Electricity were killed when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in southern BaghdadÂ’s Al-Dura district.In a separate strike in Baghdad, insurgents set off a car bomb in a market in Al-Hurriyah, killing two people and wounding eight more, the official said. A roadside bomb also went off in east Baghdad killing three and wounding another four. Elsewhere, seven Iraqi soldiers were killed in two incidents in Fallujah. Iraqi army captain Mohammed Fayad said four soldiers were killed and three wounded when a missile hit their camp northeast of Fallujah.
Meanwhile, a top aide and three supporters of Shia radical leader Moqtada Sadr were arrested in a pre-dawn swoop by US and Iraqi forces in Najaf on Thursday. Salah al-Obeidi, a close colleague of Sadr, was picked up from his home in Najaf along with cleric Bassim al-Ghuraifi, the radical leader’s office said. Two others were also arrested, but their identities were not immediately known. A spokesman for Sadr’s group in Baghdad, Hazem al-Aaraji, denied he was one of those arrested as reported earlier, but confirmed that security forces had surrounded his house in Kadhimiyah. Sadr’s representatives accused US forces of “carrying out arrests and seeking to destabilise regions where security prevails”. The US military would neither confirm nor deny the arrests.