BAGHDAD - Eleven Iraqis were killed in rebel attacks in the past two days, Iraqi security sources said Sunday, as 12 corpses that had been rotting on a farm for a month were found by soldiers south of Baghdad.
The chief engineer at Baghdad airport, Moayad Ibrahim al-Muslah, was shot dead Saturday at his home in Ghazaliyah district in western Baghdad, an interior ministry official said, on condition of anonymity.
Separately, a policeman was killed at 8:15 am (0515 GMT) when a mortar struck a checkpoint in Maamel district in eastern Baghdad, the official said, adding three other officers were wounded in the attack.
Another bomb attack aimed at a US patrol on the eastern side of the city killed two Iraqis including a 15-year-old boy and wounded at least 10 according to hospital and security sources.
A policeman at the scene, Captain Mohammed al-Rubaiye, said it was a car bomb.
In northern Iraq, four people were killed, including two Iraqi policemen, when a pickup truck bomb exploded Saturday outside the home of Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed al-Juburi, one of the police commanders in the restive town of Al-Shurgat, police said.
Two Iraqis soldiers died in a bomb attack in Siniya near Baiji, home to Iraq's largest refinery, 200 kilometres (153 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
To the east of Baiji, a back-up fuel pipeline was on fire after saboteurs dynamited the route, said Jomaa Abed, an oil security force commander.
Outside Baquba, 60 kilometres north of Baghdad, a truck driver was killed and two others wounded by armed men after they delivered gravel to a US base.
An official from the party of secular Shiite politician Ahmed Chalabi was seriously wounded by gunmen Sunday morning in the Sunni rebel stronghold of Ramadi, 100 kilometres west of Baghdad, police said.
Hamid Farhan Dlimi, a member of the Iraqi National Congress, was driving his car when a vehicle drove up and gunmen opened fire, said police lieutenant Khaldun Dlimi.
Dlimi, his body riddled with bullets, was taken to hospital and listed in serious condition, said Dlimi.
Two policemen were wounded in Tuz, 160 kilometres north of Baghdad, local police said, adding three soldiers had been wounded in a mortar strike in Dhuluiyah, 70 kilometres north of the capital.
In Mahahawil, 90 kilometres south of Baghdad, two shepherds were found dead and a third wounded when they accidentally set off unexploded bombs from the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, police said.
Two other Iraqis were killed when a US military vehicle smashed into four cars in southern Baghdad, the official added.
Separately, the corpses of 12 Iraqis were found south of Baghdad in a treacherous belt of towns, where rebels regularly carry out executions and kidnappings.
"Twelve bodies, three of them soldiers, were found on a farm five kilometres east of Latifiyah," the source said.
Nine of the dead resembled Shiite pilgrims on their way to the shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf when they were ambushed, the source said.
Also in Latifiyah, six armed men were arrested, two of them wounded, after a gunfight when the rebels tried to blow up a railroad line on a bridge, the source said.
03/13/2005 14:35 GMT