In addition, the bodies of eight Iraqis who apparently were kidnapped and killed in captivity, were found in the capital on Monday, police said.
Meanwhile, the toll among American service members in the Iraq war also was approaching 2,000 dead. At least 1,996 members of the US military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Monday’s worst attack occurred in the Saydiyah area of southwestern Baghdad when suspected insurgents opened fire at two civilian cars, killing three of the municipal workers they were carrying and an Iraqi passer-by, said police Capt. Talib Thamir.
A suicide car bomber killed two Iraqis and wounded five in an attack on a police patrol in the northeastern neighborhood of Shaab, where insurgents had kidnapped and murdered a defence lawyer in Saddam Hussein’s trial last week, said police Lt. Malik Sultan.
Insurgents opened fire on an Iraqi army checkpoint in western Baghdad, killing a soldier and a girl who was standing in front of her nearby house, said police 1st. Lt. Thaeir Mahmod.
In two other attacks in the capital, a drive-by shooting killed one policeman and two others were wounded by a roadside bomb, authorities said.
In Kirkuk, 290 kilometers (180 miles) north of Baghdad, a roadside bomb exploded at 8:30 a.m. near a car carrying Ibrahim Zangana, a senior member of Iraq’s Kurdish Democratic Party, seriously wounding him, killing one of his bodyguards and injuring another one, said Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir, the commander of Kirkuk’s police force.
A drive-by shooting in Mosul, 360 kilometers (225 miles) northwest of Baghdad, killed a policeman.
On Sunday, more than 33 Iraqis died in a swell of violence in Iraq, including 12 labourers, five of them brothers, who were gunned down by insurgents at a construction site outside the city of Hillah, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.
The corpses of eight Iraqis - five men and three women - also were found in three different areas of Baghdad on Monday morning, police said. All of them apparently had been kidnapped, tied up or handcuffed, and shot to death.
Insurgents also fired mortar rounds that set fire to an oil pipeline in northern Iraq and wounded two nearby Iraqi soldiers, said soldier Hussein Ghadban Al Ubaidi. The pipeline is located in a village about 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Beiji city. It is one of many that link an oil field in Kirkuk city to Iraq’s largest oil refinery in Beiji. Such attacks on Iraq’s beleaguered oil industry in the north are common.
Shaab, where the suicide car bomb exploded on Monday, is the area of Baghdad where 10 gunmen wearing police and military uniforms on Thursday kidnapped Sunni Arab Saadoun Sughaiyer Al Janabi, one of the lawyers in the trial of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein and seven former officials from his Sunni-dominated regime.
The 12 remaining Saddam trial defence lawyers have since rejected an offer from the Interior Ministry for better security, demanding protection from American officials instead.
Also on Sunday, investigative judges took testimony from the first witness in the Saddam mass murder trial regarding the 1982 massacre of 148 Shias in the town of Dujail.
The judges went to a military hospital to take the deposition from Wadah Ismail Al Sheik, a cancer patient who was director of the investigation department at Saddam’s feared Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the Dujail massacre. Al Sheik is too sick to appear in court, and officials did not want to wait until the trial resumes Nov. 28 to get his testimony.
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