TIKRIT (Iraq), Dec 25: Two suicide bombs killed 29 people in Iraq on Tuesday, including 25 who died when a bomber slammed his vehicle into a truck carrying gas cylinders at a checkpoint in the northern oil town of Baiji.

The two attacks appeared to be directed against groups fighting Al Qaeda militants in Iraq.

The truck bombing occurred on the outskirts of the oil refinery town of Baiji, 200km north of Baghdad, Iraqi and US military officials said.

A security official from a joint US-Iraqi security coordination centre in Tikrit said the bomber drove his pick-up vehicle into the truck, which was full of cooking gas cylinders, at the checkpoint manned by Iraqi soldiers and members of a militia group fighting Al Qaeda.

About 85 people were also wounded, he said.

The US military in a separate statement said two bombers were inside the blue truck used to carry out the attack in Baiji.

“The enemy is making last-ditch efforts to derail and discredit the local Iraqi security forces by targeting innocent citizens of Baiji,” said Lieutenant Colonel Peter Wilhelm, the US military commander in Baiji.

POLICE CHIEF SACKED: Baiji police chief Lieutenant Colonel Saleh al-Qaisi was sacked by the interior ministry immediately after the attack, state-television Al-Iraqiya said, quoting the ministry’s director of operations Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf.

The police imposed a curfew in Baiji after the attack which was close to the oil refinery from where fuel products are distributed across Iraq.

Shortly after the Baiji bombing, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the midst of a funeral procession in the city of Baquba, north of Baghdad, killing at least four members of a similar militia group fighting Al-Qaeda, police and medics said.

The US military said 10 Iraqis were killed and five wounded.—AFP