Iraqi army officer among four killed

Baghdad: A senior Iraqi army officer, a Sunni tribal chief and at least two other people were killed in violence across the country on Monday, police said.

In Fallujah, west of Baghdad, Capt Ebrahim Khairallah Hamadi died when a bomb attached to his car exploded in his housing complex, Maj Yassin Mohammad said. One of Hamadi's guards was wounded in the attack.

In Mosul, a Sunni tribal chief was killed and his driver wounded in a similar attack in the centre of the city, according to a police officer who declined to be identified.

He said six police officers and soldiers were wounded by a roadside bomb in western Mosul targeting a joint patrol.

And in eastern Baghdad, one person was killed and four others were wounded by a roadside bomb.

According to another police officer, gunmen shot dead the brother of a police major outside Baquba.

Meanwhile, one of the people wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a funeral in the Iraqi city of Fallujah on Sunday night has died, police said. The death brought the number of people killed in the attack to five.

Mourners had gathered to chant funeral prayers for one of the five people killed when a bomb exploded outside the offices of Vice-President Tariq Al Hashemi's Iraqi Islamic Party the day before.

Fallujah was once the site of some of the fiercest fighting between insurgents and US and Iraqi forces. Since the government recruited militias to fight insurgents in the area, the area has been relatively quiet, though a string of attacks targeting militiamen and others who work with the government has raised fears of a renewed insurgency in the area.

On Sunday night, police in Mosul said that "unknown gunmen" sprayed a soft-drink stand on the road linking the northern city of Mosul with the town of Talkif with machine-gun fire, killing a Christian man working there.

Mosul and its environs are among the most ethnically and religiously diverse areas in Iraq.

They have also remained the site of near-daily deadly violence, despite security pushes that police say have netted hundreds of suspected insurgents this year.