IRAQ: Two car bombs exploded near Iraq's interior ministry in Baghdad yesterday, killing at least five policemen. Al-Qaeda's local wing said it was a twin suicide attack to try to assassinate the minister.
The group, led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, vowed to pursue interior minister Falah al-Naqib. "This blessed Thursday morning, two lions from the martyrs brigade set out and launched a heroic attack on the collaborationist interior ministry, targeting the interior minister," al- Qaeda in Iraq said on an Islamist website.
A police source said the car bombs exploded just outside the heavily guarded ministry in central Baghdad. At least five police officers were killed and several others wounded.
Across Iraq, suicide bombers and clashes between insurgents and US forces added to a US military death toll which has passed 1,500, according to Pentagon figures announced on yesterday.
In the north, gunmen sabotaged power supplies, underscoring the problems new Iraqi ministers face. In fresh violence also in the north, two Iraqis working for a construction equipment company that supplies American contractors were killed by insurgents in Kirkuk, police said. Nearby in Tikrit, one Iraqi soldier was killed and six wounded by gunmen, and in Baquba a suicide bomber blew himself up near the local army headquarters, killing one civilian and wounding 14 people.
In Qaim, 500km (310 miles) west of Baghdad near the Syrian border, three people were killed, including a woman and child, in clashes between US troops and insurgents, doctors said.
In Baghdad, police discovered the bodies of three men who had been blindfolded and shot in the back of the head, a scene that is becoming increasingly common in Iraq. Guerrillas yesterday also targeted energy infrastructure, blowing up a gas pipeline feeding Iraq's main power station.
Italy's European Affairs Minister Rocco Buttilgione is ready to testify as a character witness for Tareq Aziz when Iraq's former deputy prime minister is put on trial, the minister's office said yesterday.
"He is ready to go to the trial and testify about the moderating role that Tareq Aziz had with regards to Saddam Hussein and the efforts that he made to avoid the last two wars in Iraq," a spokesman for Mr Buttiglione said. Mr Buttiglione is a friend of the Pope and a devout Roman Catholic. Last year he had to abandon hopes of becoming a European Commissioner after telling an EU parliamentary commission that homosexuality was a sin.