Insurgents killed at least 13 people across Iraq on Saturday, while police found the bodies of 11 men shot dead in apparent sectarian killings, said security officials. The US military also announced that three of its soldiers were wounded in a bomb attack in Baghdad. A string of explosions rocked the capital early on Saturday, killing at least four people and wounding dozens, said security officials. Most of the attacks appeared to have targeted security forces, including a large car bomb in Zayuna that went off as a US patrol passed, but killed only two Iraqi passers-by, said Interior Ministry spokesman Brigadier Abdul Karim Khalaf.
In the central Baghdad neighbourhood of Waziriyah, a man attempted to ram his car into a police station and was shot, but not before he detonated the explosives in the vehicle, killing a policeman and wounding 10 other people.
Smaller blasts in other parts of the capital wounded another half dozen civilians, Khalaf added. A security official said that gunmen fired at two employees of the state-owned Sabah newspaper as they drove to work, killing one and wounding the other.
The military said that insurgents also set off a bomb against a US Humvee jeep in BaghdadÂ’s eastern Jadida neighbourhood, in which three soldiers were wounded.
In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, twin blasts killed four people and injured 16. The bombers detonated the second device as a police patrol arrived at the site of the first blast, killing one officer and injuring two, said Lt Col Akram Abdullah of Kirkuk police.
In Tikrit, one civilian was killed by gunmen, police said. In the flashpoint province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, four civilians were shot dead in separate attacks. Provincial police said they had found a severed head from the roadside in the town of Khalis.
South of Baghdad, authorities discovered bodies of 11 people who had been shot dead, four of them in the town of Suwayrah and six in Mahmudiyah.