Nearly 50 Killed in another day of tragedy for Iraq

Gunmen and car bombings killed nearly 50 Iraqis in several attacks around the country Wednesday, police officials said, in a new wave of violence that has ended a week-long lull in fighting.




Gunmen ambushed a heavily defended convoy of telecommunications workers traveling the streets of the capital Wednesday morning, killing 10 security guards and kidnapping two African engineers, an Iraqi government spokesman said.

It was unclear who seized the engineers, who worked for the Iraqna cell phone company, said Col. Mohammed Ahmed Nuaimi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. Nuaimi said the ambush had taken place in Baghdad's western Nafaq al-Shurta district, which neighbors a Sunni Arab-dominated area of the city. A report by the Associated Press, citing a statement by Iraqna, said that the kidnapped engineers had come from Malawi and Madagascar.

Baghdad police also discovered the bodies of seven people, believed to be Shiites, who had been left in a deserted area of the Wahdah neighborhood, Nuaimi said. He believed that the victims had been kidnapped from the same area a few days before.

Nuaimi also said that two car-bomb explosions in the capital wounded several people, including five police officers, but that no one was killed.

In the town of Nibaei in northern Iraq, police found the bodies of 25 people who had been shot in the back of their heads, a police spokesman there said in an interview. A witness told police that armed men had set up checkpoints and scanned the identity cards of passersby with the goal of killing police officers and other government employees, Lt. Raed Mahdi Khazraji of the Salah al-Din provincial police force said. Khazraji said that the witness had been spared because he was a retired teacher.

Another group of gunmen attacked a police station in Iskandariyah, about 25 miles south of Baghdad, a spokesman for the Babil province police force said. Two officers were killed and four were wounded in the ensuing firefight, police Capt. Muthanna Ahmed said. The police captured three of the gunmen, Ahmed said, and discovered that one of them was a foreign fighter.

In another attack reported Wednesday, a roadside bomb exploded near an Iraqi police patrol in the town of Saadiya to the east of Baghdad, killing three officers and one civilian, according to a spokesman for the Diyala province police.

Source Washington Post