A car bomb exploded in a market in the northern city of Mosul, Iraq, on Monday, killing at least seven people and wounding 28, officials said.
The attack was aimed at a police patrol but missed its target and hit the market instead. At least seven civilians were killed and 28 were wounded, according to police and Dr Baha al-Bakri of the Mosul General Hospital. Five cars also were left charred, police said.
A roadside bomb also struck a British armoured vehicle at 6am south of Amarah, 290km south-east of Baghdad, British spokesperson Captain Kelly Goodall said, adding that nobody was wounded but the vehicle was heavily damaged.
Police also said two mortar rounds landed outside the British/Australian base in Samawah, 370km south-east of Baghdad, but no injuries or damage were reported.
The attacks underscored the increasing danger facing coalition forces in the predominantly Shi’ite southern Iraq, which has been relatively quiet during a more than three-year-old Sunni-led insurgency but has seen an increase in attacks in recent months.
A self-styled Shi’ite Muslim insurgent group has pledged to fight American, British and other coalition forces but to spare Iraqi civilians and soldiers.
”We have been patient enough and we have given the political process a chance,” the Islamic Resistance in Iraq-Abbas Brigades said in a videotape aired on Sunday by a Lebanese TV station.
Elsewhere, the bullet-riddled bodies of five Iraqi soldiers were found by a sanitation plant in Mandali, on the Iranian border 100km east of Baghdad, police said.
A mortar round struck a popular fruit and vegetable market in north-eastern Baghdad, wounding nine people, police Captain Ali al-Obeidi said. Associated Press television news footage showed crumpled metal stalls and smashed cucumbers and tomatoes, with a pool of blood on the ground.
A suicide car bomber apparently targeting an Iraqi patrol also blew himself up near the al-Kindi hospital in eastern Baghdad, wounding two soldiers, two police officers and one civilian, Lieutenant Ahmed Qassim said.
People in the Sunni neighbourhood of Azamiyah in northern Baghdad ventured back out onto the streets, which were calm a day after fierce clashes between Iraqi soldiers and gunmen.
The clashes broke out after attackers fired nine rockets, some of which landed near the country’s most-revered Sunni shrine, the Grand Imam Abu Hanifa mosque, and lasted about three hours, witnesses said. — Sapa-AP