BAGHDAD - Twenty-two people were killed in a series of attacks in Baghdad Thursday, including eight policemen shot dead in their squad cars and 13 torn to pieces in a bomb blast at an army recruitment centre, an interior ministry official said.
A police guard was also killed and six others hurt in a bomb attack on the home of a deputy defence minister in the capital, the official told AFP.
Initial reports had put the death toll at 25.
Thursday's attacks, which left at least 23 wounded, followed a suicide bombing which killed 46 at a police recruitment centre in the Kurdish city of Arbil, in northern Iraq on Wednesday.
Regional Kurdish health minister Jamal Abdel Hamid told AFP that 67 of the casualties remained in hospital in Arbil Thursday.
In Baghdad, gunmen carried out two separate attacks against police patrol cars at around 6 am (0200 GMT).
In one attack, all six policemen aboard two cars were gunned down and their cars burned. In the second ambush, gunmen opened fire on two more squad cars, killing two policemen and wounding two before setting fire to one of the cars.
Two hours later, 13 people were killed, four of them soldiers, in a bomb attack against an army recruitment centre at the former Muthanna airport in the centre of town, security sources said.
Some of the dead were badly burned and difficult to identify, officials said, adding that a total of 15 were wounded in the blast, nine of them soldiers.
Initial reports had spoken of a car bomb. But a soldier, who was injured in the foot by the blast, said: "I saw a young man wearing a black T-shirt mingling with the recruits just before hearing the explosion."
Since Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari's partial cabinet line up was announced a week ago, around 250 people, both civilians and members of the security forces, have been killed in Iraq.
05/05/2005 08:17 GMT