IRAQ: A suicide car bomb exploded at a market in a mostly Shia part of Baghdad yesterday, killing 12 people in escalating violence that has claimed more than 400 lives since a new government was named two weeks ago.
In a scene that has become all too familiar on the streets of Iraq, frantic young men, some crying, pushed wooden carts carrying charred bodies.
Ambulance sirens wailed as flames and black smoke rose skywards over mangled market stalls and cars in the New Baghdad district.
The blast, which police said also wounded 56 people, followed a series of suicide bomb attacks on Wednesday that killed at least 71 people.
"There are families in the building. Most of them are wounded," a medical worker yelled over a mobile telephone as an elderly couple with bloodied heads sat in his ambulance.
Sunni insurgents have been stepping up attacks on Shia targets over the last two weeks in a campaign Iraqi officials say is designed to deepen sectarian strife.
A defence ministry official was assassinated by gunmen in southwestern Baghdad early yesterday, an interior ministry official said. Brig Ayad Imad Mehdi was killed when three insurgents stopped his car and shot him dead before fleeing.
Gunmen also killed an interior ministry official, Col Muhammad al-Taie, in a separate attack, police said. Guerrillas have also targeted ordinary Iraqis who co-operate with government security forces or US troops. Witnesses said gunmen killed two Iraqis in the northern town of Samarra for selling bread to Iraqi soldiers.
In the rebellious western Anbar province US troops are pressing ahead with operations designed to crush insurgents and foreign fighters suspected of carrying out many of the suicide bombings that have killed thousands.
The government said it has captured two followers of the Jordanian militant who has claimed responsibility for that carnage, the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
One of the militants, Amar al-Jaburi, captured on April 15th, is accused of working as a financier for Zarqawi in the northern guerrilla stronghold of Mosul.
The other, Seifeddine al-Nuaimee, was captured a few days ago. The government said he had carried out "terrorist" attacks on Iraqis and was involved in the manufacture of roadside bombs.
Two US marines were killed on Wednesday when their armoured vehicle drove over a mine in northwest Iraq near the Syrian border, the US military said yesterday.
Insurgents are also keeping up the pressure on US allies in Iraq, snatching two more foreign hostages - an Australian engineer captured in Baghdad in late April and a Japanese security contractor seized on Sunday in western Iraq.