A suicide bomber killed two policemen and a civilian at a checkpoint in central Iraq on Tuesday, while attacks elsewhere killed two other people, security officials said. The 6:10 pm (1510 GMT) bombing in the Diyala provincial capital of Baquba, north of Baghdad, also wounded seven people, Major Mohammed Karkhi said.
Police carried out a controlled explosion of a second car bomb left elsewhere in the city, Karkhi added. Ethnically divided Diyala province is one of the few remaining strongholds of al Qaeda in Iraq.
In Radwaniya, west of Baghdad, an anti-Qaeda militia commander was killed by a magnetic bomb attached to his car, a defence ministry official said. Mithaq Salman was the head of the Sahwa (Awakening) militia in the town's Dar es-Salam neighbourhood. The bomb also wounded his brother. It was in Radwaniya that a suicide bomber killed nearly 50 Sahwa members on July 18 as they queued outside an army base to receive their pay.