Car bombs kill 13 in Sulaimaniya

Two suicide bomb attacks killed at least 13 people in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya yesterday, police and hospital officials said.

One suicide bomber in a car blew himself up near a building housing regional officials who deal with Kurdish militia forces, known as the peshmerga, killing 12 people, police said.

Earlier, two other suicide bombers in cars targeted Kurdish official Mulla Bakhtiar as he left his house.

He escaped the assassination attempt but one of his guards was killed, police said.

Meanwhile, three Iraqis were killed in attacks in Baghdad yesterday, including a makeshift bomb explosion that targeted a US military convoy, an interior ministry source said.

"There is a body burning, and there are wounded," the source said of the blast in a western neighbourhood of the capital, adding later that the victim was a civilian and that a child was among the wounded.

In another attack, a police commissioner and a lieutenant-colonel were shot dead in Dura, a violent district in southern Baghdad, the source said.

An Iraqi military source in Baaquba, 60km north of the capital, said two people died and a third was wounded when their car blew up in front of the local army headquarters.

"It looks like a failed attack," said the source who added that one of the car's occupants had explosives strapped to his body.

Officials yesterday announced the arrest of what they called the "main terrorist financier" in the restive city of Fallujah.

Iraqi security forces "arrested Monem Shakem Al Qubaisi, the main terrorist financier in Fallujah", Prime Minister Ebrahim Jaafari's office said in a statement.

"Pretending to bring aid to the people of Fallujah, Al Qubaisi distributed money to terrorist groups to carry out attacks against security forces," the statement read.

The suspect also "travelled abroad to collect funds with the aim of causing trouble in Iraq", the prime minister's office added, without giving a date for his arrest.

The Sunni Arab city of Fallujah is located 50km west of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, a video was posted on an extremist website showing a US soldier being shot in Iraq while guarding an armoured vehicle.

The militant Islamic Army in Iraq issued a statement saying one of its snipers killed the soldier in Baghdad on Monday.

It was not immediately possible to verify the statement and it was unclear if the soldier had died.

"This morning, October 24, our sniper company managed to shoot an American soldier in Baghdad and kill him with God's grace," the statement claimed.

The grainy footage showed a soldier standing next to what appeared to be an armoured personnel carrier before hunching over and falling to the ground.

White smoke was seen rising from his stomach area.