Two simultaneous car-bomb blasts Wednesday rocked the neighborhood of the capital's holiest Shiite Muslim shrine, killing at least seven people and injuring 27 others, police reported.
One explosion, from a parked car, struck al-Zahraa Square, an intersection a half-mile from the large Kazimiyah shrine, said a police officer, according to the AP. The second blast occurred at the Aden intersection, at the western entrance to the Kazimiyah neighborhood.
In southern Iraq late Tuesday, three gunmen in a speeding automobile fatally shot a junior aide to the country's pre-eminent Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, police and a source in the ayatollah's office reported Wednesday. Sheikh Raheem al-Hasnawi, al-Sistani's representative in the al-Mishkhab area, 20 miles south of the southern Shiite shrine city of Najaf, was killed around 11 p.m. Tuesday near his home on the north side of Najaf, said the sources.
In the city of Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, Maj. Enad Khattab, a Beiji police director, was fatally shot along with his brother at about 10 p.m. Tuesday as they drove in central Beiji, a local police officer reported. He spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns.
Meanwhile, a suicide car bomber exploded in a marketplace in western Iraq on Tuesday, killing at least 15 bystanders, a US military spokesman said. Iraqi police earlier shot dead female suicide bomber as she approached a Baghdad recruitment centre.
