For the second time in less than a week, a bomb was activated near a bridge in southeastern Baghdad on Thursday, killing two civilians and injuring five, police said.
Last Friday, a large fuel truck approached a checkpoint at the new Diyala Bridge and the driver blew up his vehicle, killing over 10 people, police said. The bridge, which crosses the Diyala River, was damaged, setting fire to police and civilian cars that had been driving across during the attack. Since then, the crossover has been closed to traffic and Iraqis have been walking across it, toward central Baghdad, the AP reported.
At 7:30 a.m. local time Thursday, a roadside bomb went off near the entrance to the bridge, killing at least two Iraqi pedestrians and wounding five, police said.
Meanwhile, new information also emerged about several attacks in Iraq on Wednesday. At 6 p.m. Wednesday, some 10 gunmen hijacked a bus in Baqouba that was travelling from Baghdad to Kirkuk in northern Iraq, police said. The attackers took 20 women and an unknown number of children off the vehicle, then left with 23 male passengers as hostages, apparently heading toward a nearby al-Qaeda in Iraq stronghold, police said.
An apparently co-ordinated attack by five suicide car bombers and scores of gunmen backed by mortars and bombs killed four policemen in the northern Iraqi city Mosul on Wednesday night and injured 30 other people, including 14 police officers, police said.
The attacks started after 7 p.m., when two suicide bombers detonated car bombs near the police station in Mosul, 360 kilometres northwest of Baghdad. Another two suicide car bombers blew up near the headquarters of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan in another area of town, said Wathiq al-Hamdani, provincial chief of police.
Another suicide car bomber targeting police was shot by guards before he could reach his target, al-Hamdani said.
The series of attacks killed four police and wounded 30 other people, police said. Police fought back, killing 15 gunmen, al-Hamdani said.
Also Wednesday, mortar rounds landed inside the U.S.-controlled Green Zone for a second day, killing at least two people and injuring about 10 more. Some a dozen shells crashed into the 3.5-square-mile area of central Baghdad about 4 p.m., news reports claimed.
