BAGHDAD: Unidentified men shot dead an Iraqi police colonel in Baghdad on Monday while at least 13 other people, many of them security force personnel, were killed in violence around the country. Colonel Abdul Karim Fahid, chief of the Balaat al Shuhada station, one of the two main posts in the capital’s southern Dura district, was shot dead along with his driver, a defence ministry source said. The group of Iraq’s Al Qaeda frontman, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for killing the colonel in a message on a website. In further attacks targeting the security forces, a policeman and a road cleaner died when a roadside bomb planted in a garbage dump detonated in the path of a police patrol in the capital’s southwestern Al Amil neighbourhood, police said. A source at Yarmuk hospital said his facility received one dead policeman and seven wounded, including six policemen.—AFP
