Eight people were killed on Saturday and another 22 injured in separate attacks in Iraq’s violence-plagued Baghdad and Diyala provinces, according to local security sources.
“One police officer was killed and three others injured when unidentified attackers hurled grenades at a police patrol in southeastern Baghdad’s Jesr Diyala district,” a local police captain, speaking anonymously, told Anadolu Agency.
Elsewhere in Baghdad, five people were killed and 19 others injured — mostly civilians — by four bombs that went off in the province’s al-Azamiya, al-Tarmiya, al-Mashtal districts, and by another that rocked central Baghdad’s al-Mansur neighborhood, according to the same police source.
In Diyala, meanwhile, a local police source told Anadolu Agency that two police officers had been killed when gunmen opened fire on their car in central Baqubah, the provincial capital.
In a related development the same day, the Iraqi Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, a local NGO, said in a statement that the Daesh (ISIS) militant group had executed a local journalist after abducting him from his home in central Mosul, a Daesh stronghold.
According to the NGO, the victim — identified as Yahia Abd Hamad — had worked as director of al-Rashid, a Mosul-based broadcaster.
Located some 400 kilometers north of Baghdad, Mosul — Iraq’s second largest city — was overrun by Daesh in June of last year.
This story has been edited from the source material.
