13 killed in Iraq

Insurgents killed at least 13 people across Iraq on Saturday, while police found the bodies of 11 men shot dead in apparent sectarian killings, security officials said. The US military also announced that three of its soldiers were wounded in a bomb attack in Baghdad. A string of explosions rocked the capital early Saturday killing at least four people and wounding dozens, security officials said.
Most of the attacks appeared to have targeted security forces, including a large car bomb in Zayuna that went off as a US patrol passed but killed only two Iraqi bystanders, interior ministry spokesman Brigadier Abdul Karim Khalaf said.
In the central Baghdad neighbourhood of Waziriyah, a man attempted to ram his car into a police station and was shot, but not before he detonated the explosives in the vehicle, killing a policeman and wounding 10 other people. Smaller blasts in other parts of the capital wounded another half-dozen civilians, Khalaf added.
Gunmen opened fire on two employees of the state-owned Sabah newspaper as they drove to work, killing one and wounding the other, a security official said.
Insurgents also set off a bomb against a US Humvee jeep in Baghdad's eastern Jadida neighbourhood in which three soldiers were wounded, the military said.
An AFP photographer at the scene of the blast said that the Humvee was completely destroyed. In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, twin blasts killed four people and wounded 16. The bombers detonated the second device as a police patrol arrived on the scene of the first blast, killing one officer and wounding two, said Lieutenant Colonel Akram Abdullah of Kirkuk police.
In Tikrit - the hometown of Saddam Hussein - one civilian was killed by gunmen, police said. In the flashpoint province of Diyala, north-east of Baghdad, four civilians were shot dead in separate attacks. Provincial police said they had also recovered a severed head from the roadside in the town of Khalis.
South of Baghdad, authorities discovered the bodies of 11 people who had been shot dead, four of them in the town of Suwayrah, which has become a common dumping ground for victims of sectarian killings, and six in Mahmudiyah.