A suicide car bomb hit a police patrol near the Iraqi Oil Ministry in Baghdad, killing nine Iraqis and injuring nine. The dead included five policemen and four civilians, and the wounded four policemen and five civilians, reports said.
Also Thursday, a roadside bomb hit a US Army patrol in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, killing one soldier.
Earlier, a suicide car bomb went off near a four-car convoy of foreign private security contractors in eastern Baghdad, killing one Iraqi bystander and injuring eight others, police said.
Elsewhere in the capital, three civilians and one policeman were shot dead in three separate incidents, security officials reported, while a retired police general and his two-year-old daughter were killed in a drive-by shooting in the northern city of Kirkuk on Wednesday. Armed groups also bombed an aboveground pipeline near Kirkuk early Thursday. The pipeline connects oil fields with Kirkuk's refineries, AFP reported.
On Wednesday, a bomb went off at the entrance of a Shiite mosque in Hillah, a city south of the capital, killing at least 25 and injuring 93.
Meanwhile, Iraq's president Jalal Talabani on Thursday disclosed during a press interview published by Egypt's al-Ahram newspaper that followers of Saddam Hussein are secretly negotiating with the United States a halt to attacks in return for a pledge that the former Iraqi president will not be executed. "Despite that, the Saddamists are trying now to negotiate with the Americans on stopping the operations in exchange for not executing Saddam in the trial which is about to start," Talabani was quoted as saying.
