BAGHDAD, March 24: Seventeen people were killed in an array of shootings and bombings in an unusually violent Friday in Iraq. Five men were killed and 17 wounded when a bomb exploded amongst a crowd of faithful leaving a mosque after Friday prayers, northeast of Baghdad.

The attack took place outside the Saad Ibn Abi Wakkas mosque, in Khalis, 80 kilometres from the capital.

Just south of the capital in Mahmudiya, in the ‘triangle of Death’, gunmen burst into a house and killed four family members, leaving the mother wounded.

Police were not clear whether the family was Sunni or Shia, but the mixed area is known for its sectarian killings.

In Basra, a man was shot dead by unidentified gunmen, also on leaving a mosque after prayers.

Sectarian violence has been on the rise in Iraq since Feb 22 – the day a bomb destroyed a shrine in Samarra, north of the capital.

Hundreds of men have since been murdered in tit-for-tat killings.

15 BODIES FOUND: In Baghdad, where bodies are now found on a daily basis, 15 corpses were recovered on Friday, an interior ministry official said.

They had been tortured and shot.

In the week of March 11 to 17, US forces tracked 58 such incidents, involving 134 dead, in the capital alone, according to Maj Gen Rick Lynch of the US Army, who described the killings as ‘ethnic-sectarian’.

In other incidents of violence on Friday, seven people, three of them policemen, were killed in the capital.

Gunmen raided a bakery in the south of Baghdad, shooting dead four employees and wounding a fifth. When police arrived on the scene, a roadside bomb exploded, killing one police official and wounding another.

Unidentified men also ambushed police in the west of the city, shooting dead two and wounding one.

Two bodyguards attached to a politician from former prime minister Iyad Allawi’s National List were wounded in an ambush in Baghdad.—AFP