Suicide bomber kills two in Iraq
US troops kill 8 Iraqi attackers, arrest relatives of key fugitive
AFP/ BBC, Baquba
A suicide car bombing yesterday outside a police station in the violence-hit Iraqi town of Baquba killed at least two people as well as the bomber and injured 29, just days after an attack on a nearby mosque that left five dead. At Samarra, US forces killed eight suspected insurgents after a drive-by attack in central Iraq and detained four relatives of the most wanted member of Saddam Hussein's regime still at large, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. The former vice-president, one of Saddam Hussein's right-hand men, is believed by the Americans to be directing much of the resistance to US-led occupying forces in central Iraq. Baquba's general hospital surgeon said, "Two people were killed and 29 were injured including 14 police officers." It was chaos on the streets of Baquba as residents rushed to the town's main hospital to check if their loved ones were caught in the attack. Police was seen holding them back at the hospital's gates. The attack occurred at about 8:30 am (0530 GMT) when a green Toyota forced its way into a guarded street where the civil emergency police unit and municipal government offices are located, policeman Haidar Ismail told AFP. "The guards tried, without success, to stop the car from entering the area, and the driver was able to drive up to the police unit before the blast went off," he said. "I saw the remains of the car driver all over the place and the building was severely damaged." Both Samarra and Baquba are in an area of Iraq known as the Sunni triangle, where resistance to the American-led occupation is strong. Tuesday's attacks at Samarra involved people firing from a convoy of eight vehicles, Major Aberle said. Two cars were destroyed while the six others were seized and their 26 occupants were arrested, she added. Major Aberle described the way the Iraqis had initially opened fire on the US troops as a "drive-by shooting". "The attackers fired on the soldiers with automatic weapons. They attempted to escape after the initial confrontation," she said. The four men held after a dawn raid in Samarra are all thought to be nephews of the former vice-president, Al-Douri, who has a $10m bounty on his head. American forces suspect they had been sheltering him in a series of safe houses. Lieutenant-Colonel David Poirier said the men arrested had been "enablers" for Al-Douri and they had good information on his whereabouts. "We think that [the raid] brought us one step closer to finding him."
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