Six gunmen broke into a house just south of Baghdad on Thursday and killed 11 members of one Shiite family by slitting their throats, police said. Earlier, the family had been warned by gunmen to move out of the largely Sunni district of Latifiya, around 20 km south of the capital, but had not done so.
Seven of the victims were men and four were women, police said.
A suicide bomber, wearing a police uniform, killed four Iraqi policemen and injured five others at checkpoint close to the interior ministry in Baghdad on Thursday, police said, according to Reuters. Gunmen in Baghdad assassinated an Iraqi driver working with a French company. In addition, a university student in northwestern Baghdad was killed in a drive-by shooting.
In another development, US fighter jets dropped two bombs on suspected "insurgent targets" in a northern Iraq town, killing 10, the US military said in a statement on Thursday.
Meanwhile, the top U.N. elections official in Iraq stated Wednesday that the recent parliamentary election was “transparent, credible and good” and that there was no reason to rerun it.
The statement by Craig Jenness, a U.N. special commissioner came following days of accusations of rampant fraud and daily protests by Sunnis.
Jenness termed the number of complaints “low,” but acknowledged that “not all candidates will be satisfied” with the results. He said, however, that “we at the United Nations see no justification in calls for a rerun.”
