BAGHDAD, Aug 9 (AFP) - Six Iraqis were killed and 16 wounded, including a provincial government official, in a suicide car bombing Monday near the restive city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, police said.
"Six people were killed, including five policemen, and 16 wounded, among them civilians and police," said General Daoud Mohammed Aziz, the police chief of Baladruz, east of Baquba.
The bomb exploded as Akeel Hamid, an assistant to the provincial governor, was leaving his home in Baladruz, said Lieutenant Mohammed Abed. Aziz confirmed it was a suicide bombing.
A huge suicide car bomb outside a Baquba police station on July 28, exactly one month after the interim government took power from the former US-led occupation authority, killed 70 Iraqis, mostly prospective police recruits.
In Najaf, south of Baghdad, artillery and tank fire, backed by air power, battered the Shiite holy city on Monday as militiamen fought US troops and Iraqi forces for a fifth straight day.
Since the fighting erupted last Thursday, when the Mehdi Army militia attacked the main police station and governor Adnan al-Zorfi requested US support, the military estimates that more than 360 insurgents have been killed.
The US toll stands at four dead and 19 members of the US-led multinational forces wounded.
But a spokesman for radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr insisted that only 15 militiamen had been killed and 35 wounded, the majority from cluster bombs fired by US troops.
Sadr Monday rejected a call from Prime Minister Iyad Allawi for his forces to quit Najaf, saying he would fight to his last drop of blood against foreign occupation.
In the Baghdad stronghold of Sadr's Mehdi Army, mortar bombs were fired at the district council hall in the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City on Monday. Missing the council hall, they slammed into neighbouring houses.
Abu Moqtada, a local Mehdi Army leader, told AFP the militia had fired 10 to 15 mortars at the building. There were no reports of casualties.
The Iraqi government decided after the attacks to impose a curfew in Sadr City between 4 pm (1200 GMT) and 8 am (0400 GMT), an interior ministry spokesman told AFP.
Three rounds of mortar fire also struck the oil ministry compound in Baghdad, the ministry said, again without leaving casualties. A car belonging to a guard was destroyed.
In Mussayab, some 50 kilometres (30 miles) south of the capital, a police lieutenant was killed and three policemen were wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol on Monday, police said.
Nine gunmen were later arrested in Imam On, 10 kilometres (six miles) north of the Shiite holy city of Karbala, after a car chase, they said.