BAGHDAD - Five bodies, including that of a female university student, were found south of Baghdad Wednesday while a mortar killed an Iraqi girl and wounded another at a primary school west of the capital, police and medical sources said.
The five bodies which, were all shot in the head except for the female who had her throat slit, were found on farmland in the Suwaira district, 50 kilometres south of the capital, said Lieutenant Colonel Khalil Obeid, Suwaira police chief. All were unidentified except for one man named Falih Abdul Ridha a labourer from the area, according to Obeid.
Attacks on cars travelling through this treacherous area are commonplace.
A mortar shell meanwhile fell on the Al-Junainah school in the Amariyah district, killing an 11-year-old girl and also wounding a 13-year-old female student, a hospital worker at Yarmuk hospital said.
"The mortar hit at 11:00 am (0800 GMT), and no US or Iraqi forces were there," another hospital official said.
Amariyah, long considered sympathetic to the insurgency due to its location on the edge of western Baghdad, is not far from Baghdad international airport, which houses Camp Victory, the US military's command centre for Iraq.
Meanwhile, two attackers tried to detonate a suicide car bomb on Wednesday morning in the Shiite district of Kadhimiyah, but only the initial charge went off, wounding one of the attackers while the other escaped, an interior ministry official said.
Ahmad al-Janabi, a Sunni Muslim from the mixed Sunni-Shiite city of Mussayeb, 60 kilometres (46 miles) south of Baghdad, was arrested.
"He swore they wanted to blow up their vehicle at the market and kill civilians," the official said.
03/23/2005 17:57 GMT