BAGHDAD, April 4: At least 21 people were killed across Iraq on Tuesday, including 10 in a car bombing in eastern Baghdad, security officials said. Another 25 people were wounded in the explosion of a car bomb parked in the Al-Habibiyah neighbourhood.

Elsewhere, 11 Iraqis were killed, two of them children and two employees of the embassy of the United Arab Emirates, security officials said.

Since Monday night police also recovered 18 bodies across Iraq, many of them tortured and riddled with bullets.

The two children were killed when a bomb exploded inside their house in eastern Baghdad.

The bomb also wounded three other members of the family in the capital’s Al-Jadida neighbourhood.

In a brutal ambush, two Iraqis working at the UAE embassy were gunned down when they were travelling in their car in the upscale Mansour neighbourhood.

In the south of the country, in the Sahl area near the border with Saudi Arabia, two teenage shepherds were killed by an anti-personnel mine.

In Basra a policeman was also killed and another officer wounded when they were attacked by gunmen early on Tuesday.

One civilian was killed by a roadside bomb near Fatiha, north of the oil refining city of Baiji, while two truck drivers from a US base near Dujail were also shot dead by rebels.

One civilian was allegedly killed by US forces near a checkpoint, north of Tikrit, police said, but there was no immediate confirmation from the US military.

In the same region, but in a separate incident, an Iraqi truck driver was kidnapped, police added.

On Tuesday a high-ranking local official with the Samarra municipality north of Baghdad narrowly escaped injury in a car bomb explosion that wounded four of his guards, killing one, local police said. The car bomb detonated as the convoy of Assad Yassin, the municipal council president, passed by.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi cabinet said three guerillas were killed, including one known as the ‘Prince of Princes’, in an operation in Tarmiya, just north of Baghdad.

The release gave no further detail about the ‘prince’.

The cabinet said the operation was spurred by intelligence garnered in Samarra and that the men were implicated in attacks in the oil refining town of Baiji, farther north.

Thirteen other guerillas were reported arrested around the country.

Meanwhile, two mass graves dating from the regime of Saddam Hussein were found near the southern city of Nasiriyah, a local organization said.—AFP