BASRA, July 30: A roadside bomb blew up beside a British consulate convoy in the southern Iraqi city of Basra on Saturday, killing two Britons working for a private security firm, a consular spokeswoman and the company said. Karen McLuskie of the consulate in Basra said the convoy was attacked as it passed through a southwestern part of the city. It was not clear if anyone else was injured in the blast.

The two dead were security contractors employed by Control Risks Group and both were British citizens, said Peter Stevenson, a spokesman for the London-based security company.

“Although anyone working in Iraq is well aware of the dangers involved it in no way diminishes the sadness we feel for the two men who have died today,” Richard Fenning, Chief Operating Officer of Control Risks Group, said in a statement. In Baghdad, insurgents kept up pressure on security forces in their drive to topple the US-backed government.

A suicide bomber in a car attacked a police checkpoint near the National Theatre, killing at least five people and wounding 20, a police source said. Insurgents have killed hundreds of Iraqi forces, deepening frustrations with a government that has been promising stability since January elections empowered Shias for the first time and sidelined Arab Sunnis.

Hours earlier, moderate Arab Sunni leader Sheikh Khalaf al- Ilayan escaped an assassination attempt in which his bodyguard was wounded, said a spokesman for his group, The Iraqi National Dialogue.

Two members of The Iraqi National Dialogue serving on the committee drafting Iraq’s new constitution were shot dead two weeks ago, prompting Sunnis to boycott the panel for six days.

They resumed their work, but Saturday’s assassination attempt was a new challenge to the Shia-dominated government’s strategy of drawing Sunnis into the political process to try to defuse the insurgency.—Reuters