A bombing attack on an American convoy in southern Baghdad killed one US soldier and injured four others Tuesday, while gunmen broke into a house and abducted a senior Interior Ministry official, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.
An abandoned taxi went off as the U.S. patrol drove the expressway in the Dora neighborhood, said Sgt. 1st Class David Abrams, a spokesman for Task Force Baghdad. According to The AP, he said one of the wounded soldiers had minor injuries.
Another explosion targeted a joint Iraqi-U.S. convoy in the Amiriyah neighborhood in Baghdad, said al-Amil police officer Capt. Talib Thamir. Earlier, a car bomb went off near an Iraqi army patrol close to Baghdad's international airport on Tuesday, killing one civilian, police said.
A top Interior Ministry official, Brig. Gen. Jala Mohammed Saleh, was kidnapped by gunmen who broke into his house, a ministry official confirmed.
In Hillah, a member of the Babil provincial council, Salim Hilal, was shot dead as he was on his way to work, police spokesman Capt. Muthana Khalid said.
In the central city of Baqouba, gunmen wounded a government translator and killed her father in a drive-by shooting, said Brig. Gen. Adil Molan of the Diyala provincial police.
Elsewhere, one policeman was killed and two others were wounded when a roadside bomb hit their car in the southern city of Basra, police Col. Karim al-Zeidi said.
Also Tuesday, the U.S. military said a U.S. Marine was killed on Monday by an explosion in the western province of Anbar. Two other US soldiers and one Iraqi soldier were killed in clashes with armed groups northeast of Baghdad, the US military said.
According to AFP, the American troops had been backing two Iraqi army battalions searching for weapons caches in Diyala province, the military said.
And a video posted Tuesday on the Internet showed purported al-Qaeda members in Iraq beheading a man said to be an Iraqi security force member. A statement shown on the video identified the Iraqi National Guard member as Jassim Mohammed Hussein Mahdi, who appeared to be in his early 20s
Meanwhile, prisoners at Iraq's largest detention facility protested the transfer of several detainees deemed "unruly" by authorities, throwing rocks and setting tents on fire in an incident that wounded four guards and 12 detainees, the US Army said Monday.
Friday's protest at Camp Bucca, which holds about 6,000 prisoners, nearly two-thirds of all those in Iraq, caused only minor injuries before being brought under control, authorities said, according to The AP.
Murtadha al-Hajaj, an official at Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's office in the southern city of Umm Qasr, near Camp Bucca, said several al-Sadr followers were wounded during the confrontation. He said they were protesting a lack of access to medical treatment and claimed American guards opened fire.
In the meantime, the US military said Tuesday that a US Marine was killed in action on Monday in Iraq's Anbar province, located west of Baghdad, according to Reuters.
In a statement, the military said the Marine was killed by "an explosion which occurred during combat operations."
