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Bombing of police official's home kills 11 in Iraq
TIKRIT, Iraq | Tue Oct 19, 2010 9:55am BST
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Bombs destroyed the home of a senior Iraqi police commander on Tuesday, killing at least 11 people in the northern city of Tikrit, the hometown of former dictator Saddam Hussein, police said.
The attackers planted bombs and left a booby-trapped motorbike near the house of Lieutenant Colonel Qais Farhan, commander of the emergency response unit of Tikrit, police Major Dawood Sulaiman, who was at the scene, told Reuters. He said four people were also wounded in the explosion, including Farhan. The dead included three children and four women, all of them relatives of the police commander.
His house was left in ruins. Police, soldiers and civil defence forces searched for victims under the rubble. Overall violence in Iraq has plunged since the height in 2006 and 2007 of the sectarian slaughter unleashed after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion but deadly attacks and bombings remain a routine occurrence.
The number of civilians killed fell sharply last month after an alarming spike in the previous weeks amid a political deadlock sparked by an inconclusive election in March and ahead of the formal end of U.S. combat operations in August. But tensions between once dominant Sunnis and majority Shi'ite Muslims propelled into power after the fall of Sunni dictator Saddam are running high.
Incumbent Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is seeking to win a second term and has inched closer to forming the coalition he needs to do that, but a Sunni-backed alliance that won the most seats in the election seven months ago has refused to join him. The mainly Sunni city of Tikrit, 150 km (95 miles) north of Baghdad, has been relatively stable in the past two years.
(Reporting by Sabah al-Bazee; Writing by Aseel Kami; Editing by Myra MacDonald)
