Attacks in Iraq kill 12 people, officials say

BAGHDAD (AP) ? A suicide attacker drove his explosives-laden car on Monday into a police station in northern Iraq, killing five people, while attacks elsewhere in the country killed seven other Iraqis, including a candidate for local office, officials said.

The deputy police chief in the northern city of Kirkuk, Maj. Gen. Torhan Abdul-Rahman Youssef, said the dead in the suicide attack in the town of Dibis included two policemen and three civilians. Thirty-six others, including some students from a nearby school, were wounded in the blast, Youssef said.

The town is located near Kirkuk, which is 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of Baghdad.

In the northern city of Mosul, gunmen shot dead Bahjat Mustafa, a provincial election candidate. As he was leaving a mosque in the evening, gunmen sprayed him with bullets, said police and hospital officials said.

Campaigning began this month for provincial council elections scheduled for next month.

In Baghdad, militants launched a wave of attacks that killed six people, police and health officials said.

In the northwestern neighborhood of Shula, gunmen broke at dawn into a house, killing a man and his wife, a police officer said. In the northern Sabi al-Boor neighborhood, another group of assailants killed a minimarket owner, another police officer said.

Also, an off-duty policeman in the western Ghazaliya area was gunned down in his car by drive-by shooters. A civilian was shot dead in the southern Saydiyah neighborhood and an anti-al-Qaida militiaman was killed in southwestern Amil district.

Three medicals officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks but suicide bombings and well-coordinate assassinations are a hallmark of al-Qaida's Iraq branch.

Violence has ebbed across Iraq since the peak of the fighting in the last decade, but deadly bombings and shootings still occur almost daily.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-03-11-ML-Iraq/id-039ce9575fe94f81866047a574e8f738

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