BAGHDAD, July 14: Thirty people were killed across Iraq on Friday, including 13 Iraqi soldiers in an attack on their checkpoint near the northern oil hub of Kirkuk.

Gunmen ‘came in many vehicles and opened fire on the soldiers who were guarding the checkpoint and killed all the 13, including an officer’, colonel Mahmud Abdullah said.

He said the attack took place south of the ethnically divided city of Kirkuk.

In Baghdad, where a massive security crackdown is on since last month, seven worshippers were killed after Friday prayers in a bombing outside a mosque, a security official said.

Five people were also wounded in the bomb attack against the Ismail al-Qubaisy mosque in Al-Qahira, a mixed neighbourhood that lies between the Sunni stronghold of Adhamiyah and the Shia bastion of Sadr City.

In the restive northern city of Mosul four people were killed, including two policemen, in a suicide car bomb attack in the city’s central Muthanna neighbourhood, police said.

Five others were wounded, including two policemen, when the bomber targeted a passing police patrol.

Also in Mosul, a policeman and a bodyguard of a judge were shot dead in separate attacks by gunmen, police said.

A civilian was killed and nine others were wounded in a mortar attack in Baghdad’s Zafaraniyah neighbourhood.

In the confessionally mixed province of Diyala, northeast of the capital, two people were killed and four wounded when several mortar rounds struck a house next to a mosque in the town of Balad Ruz.

Not far from Balad Ruz, the bodies of two brothers and a cousin were found, apparently the latest victims of a mass kidnapping that took place in the nearby town of Muqdadiyah on Wednesday.

The bodies were found in a field, handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the head. Twenty-four bodies had already been found on Wednesday.

Twelve decomposing bodies were exhumed from a hole in Tall Afar in north-western Iraq following information obtained from captured guerillas, said the mayor of the town.

“These corpses were found in a hole beneath a stream that flows through the village,” said Najm Abdullah.

US CLAIM: The US military claimed on Friday it had successfully targeted and captured an Al Qaeda in Iraq ‘terrorist and two other suspects during a raid in the vicinity of Baghdad’.