At least 19 people were killed across Iraq on Friday, including 11 in Baghdad when a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a massive Shi’ite mosque despite a security crackdown in the capital, police said.
The blast, which also wounded 25 people, came just an hour before the main weekly Muslim prayers, when the Baratha mosque would have been filled with thousands of worshippers.
On April 7, a triple suicide bombing by men dressed as women targeted worshippers just as they were leaving the same mosque, killing 90 and wounding 175.
Friday’s blast came despite a security crackdown that saw vehicles banned from the capital’s streets during prayer time and tens of thousands of Iraqi and United States soldiers out on patrol.
Two people were also killed and 16 wounded when four mortar rounds struck a house and a shop in Baghdad’s Sab al-Bur neighbourhood.
Gunmen in two trucks stormed two villages in the early hours on Friday and killed three people and kidnapped nine others, police said.
The two villages are located near the town of Suwayrah, 50km south of Baghdad.
In another incident, one person was killed and another kidnapped when men dressed in Iraqi army uniforms attacked a house in al-Jahar village near the town of Madain, 25km south of Baghdad.
“The gunmen stormed the house, dragged the two men out and killed one of them in front of the house and took away the other,” a police officer said.
An Iraqi army soldier was also shot dead by gunmen in the northern town of Hawija, while an employee of the Northern Gas Company was similarly shot dead near the oil city of Kirkuk, police said.
On Thursday night, a woman and her four children were killed in Baquba when a bomb went off in a neighbour’s house, bringing the ceiling down on the family sleeping in the garden, police said. — AFP