MOSUL, Aug 1: At least 15 people were killed in attacks across Iraq on Sunday including a car bomb blast outside a police station just hours after US air strikes and clashes with insurgents in Fallujah.
At least four people died and scores were wounded in the northern city of Mosul when a driver hurtled towards a police station and crashed into concrete barriers where his car exploded.
The US military said five Iraqis were killed in the attack, including two policemen, while more than 40 others were wounded. But an official at the morgue said only four bodies had been received after the blast ripped through the entrance of the police station and gutted nearby cars.
Medics at the two main hospitals in Mosul said a total of 51 police and civilians had been admitted with injuries. The attack came four days after 70 people were killed in a bombing outside a police unit in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, and less than a week after four died in another suicide attack outside the US military base in Mosul.
In Baghdad, at least one Iraqi was killed and three were wounded, including a driver for the BBC, when a bomb narrowly missed a US convoy during the morning rush hour, the Al-Kindi hospital and the British news corporation said.
In Fallujah, US air strikes on the ground continued overnight in the fiercely anti-US Sunni Muslim bastion, west of Baghdad. "We have 10 killed and 40 injured from both the bombardment and the earlier clashes," said Rafih al-Issawi, director of Fallujah's general hospital.
Many of the injured were women and children. Air strikes destroyed one building and an insurgent position, the US military said. After daybreak, an AFP correspondent saw one house completely gutted, another half flattened and traces of cluster bombs littering in the street. -AFP
