BAGHDAD, May 2: A spate of car bombings in Baghdad killed at least 13 Iraqis on Monday. In Canberra, the Australian government vowed to stand firm in the face of demands that it withdraw its forces from Iraq following the kidnapping of an Australian contractor. There has been a sharp upsurge in violence in the capital since Thursday when parliament approved the new government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari.

The prime minister, whose team is expected to be officially sworn in on Tuesday, still has seven vacancies to fill, including the key defence and oil portfolios. Of the four car bombs that exploded around Baghdad on Monday, one targeted a convoy carrying a commander of Iraq’s elite police commandos, Gen Rashid Flaih, who escaped unhurt. Two policemen from his guard detail were wounded.

Fifteen minutes later, another car bomb blew up in a fashionable district of the city centre, killing nine civilians and wounding 10. Two policemen and two civilians also died and five people were injured when a third car bomb exploded in the eastern Zayuna district.

Iraqi and US forces carried out a number of raids in the Baghdad area over the past 24 hours, arresting 84 suspects. “Iraqi army soldiers, Iraqi police and US soldiers apprehended 84 suspected terrorists in 19 different combat operations conducted in and around Baghdad over the last 24 hours,” US forces said in a statement.

In other developments, a British soldier died from injuries sustained in ‘hostile action’ in Iraq, bringing to 87 the number of British military personnel killed since the invasion of March 2003. Elsewhere in the country, four people were hurt, including a soldier and a policeman, when a suicide bomber drove a car at an Iraqi army convoy in Tarmya, some 25 kilometres north of the capital.

A policeman was shot dead in Khalis, further north. Four Iraqi soldiers were killed and four injured in a bomb explosion on Monday some 60 kilometres north of Baghdad.

AUSTRALIAN HOSTAGE: Australian Prime Minister John Howard said on Monday his government would send an emergency team to Iraq to seek the release of kidnapped engineer Douglas Wood, 63.—AFP