Iraqi police killed a female suicide bomber simultaneously as she exploded her vest near a checkpoint in the northern province of Salahaddin, a police source said Saturday. Police tried to stop a woman, who appeared to be in her 20s, who was wearing long robes. After she ignored repeated orders to stop, a policeman shot her, just at the moment when she detonated her vest, police officer Mohamed Khaled Abdel Hamid told the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency.
The incident comes amid ongoing security worries about female suicide attackers, wearing black, head-to-toe robes, being able to more easily to infiltrate crowds because they are less frequently subjected body searches. Religious and cultural rules prevent security officers from touching women while conducting searches. In Hillah, some 100 kilometres south of Baghdad, unknown gunmen in a car shot a leader of the Awakening Councils and then escaped.
Abdel Hadi Ali Mekky was in his car when the attackers approached him with their car and shot him, police told VOI. Awakening Councils or sons of Iraq are tribal police who have co-operated with the US to fight the al Qaeda organisation in Iraq. Separately, a woman was killed and four of her family were wounded when a bomb went off in front of her house in al-Saeda district in Baquba city, a security source told.