At least 19 people were killed in violence in Iraq on Wednesday, including 12 in an ambush near the restive city of Baquba, security officials said.
President Jalal Talabani, meanwhile, appealed for a halt to the sectarian violence, which has seen more than 1,000 people killed in Baghdad alone over the past month.
Twelve people were killed Wednesday as gunmen ambushed a minibus carrying employees of a local electricity company near Baquba, north of the capital, and "sprayed it with bullets", a police official said. In a separate incident near Baquba, Kanan Abdallah, Baquba's deputy police intelligence chief, and his two bodyguards were shot dead by gunmen, police said.
In Baghdad's southern Al-Bayaa neighbourhood, defence ministry media official Mohammed Moshib was killed in an ambush on Wednesday, a source in his ministry said.
Over in the western neighbourhood of Yarmouk, unknown gunmen shot dead two traffic policemen. And a roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi army patrol near the central neighbourhood of Karrada killed one soldier. Thirteen corpses were also discovered by police around the capital: five in the southern neighbourhood of Al-Dura.
At least 1,091 people were killed in the capital last month in ongoing sectarian violence, Talabani said in a statement. "We are shocked and angry at the daily reports of unidentified bodies being discovered and of people killed on the basis of their identity," said the president.