Eight killed in north Iraq car bombs

BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber driving a vehicle packed with explosives blew himself up outside the offices of a major Kurdish party in northern Iraq early Wednesday, the deadliest in a wave of morning attacks that killed at least 31 people across the country.

A spate of bomb attacks against police in the disputed northern city of Kirkuk on Thursday killed at least 25 people and wounded 79 others, the worst violence to hit Iraq in nearly two months.The attacks in the oil-rich ethnically-mixed city come with just months to go before US forces, who participate in confidence-building tripartite patrols and checkpoints with central government forces and Kurdish security officers in Kirkuk and across north Iraq, must withdraw from the country.

Gunmen stormed a house in northern Iraq and killed a woman and her two nieces in an early morning attack, while a roadside bomb killed an education ministry official in Baghdad on Tuesday.At 2:30 am (2330 GMT) in ethnically-mixed and oil-rich Kirkuk, gunmen entered a house in the east of the city and shot dead Moha Jihad Jumaa, a schoolteacher, and her nieces, Walaa Waheed Hassan and Manal Mohan."The armed men used silencer pistols," said police Brigadier General Zain al-Abidine. "We have started an investigation into this attack. It carries the stamp of terrorism."

A car bomb in Iraq's ethnically divided northern oil hub of Kirkuk seriously wounded its police chief and killed his son on Friday, a police officer said.The blast, which struck at around 1:45 pm (1045 GMT) in the city, 240 kilometres (150 miles) north of Baghdad, also wounded another policeman and eight passersby."Kirkuk police chief Borhan Habib Tayeb was seriously wounded and his son, Lieutenant Wissam Borhan Habib, was killed ... by a car bomb targeting their convoy in the south of the city," police Colonel Ghazi Mohammed Saleh said.

Three policemen were killed and eight people were wounded on Monday by two explosions in Iraq's northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk, police said.The first blast occurred in the Wahad Zahar neighbourhood in the south of the ethnically-mixed city, 240 kilometres (150 miles) north of Baghdad, killing a policeman and injuring five other people, police Major Salam Zengana said.Later a second bomb, apparently targeting an official convoy in the same area, killed two other policemen and injured three other people, Zengana added.

A spate of bomb attacks against police in the disputed northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk on Thursday killed at least 27 people, the worst violence to hit Iraq in nearly two months.A further 89 people were wounded in the three attacks, with months to go before US forces, who participate in confidence-building tripartite patrols and checkpoints with central government forces and Kurdish security officers in Kirkuk and across north Iraq, must withdraw from the country.

NEW DELHI — Indian police said they arrested five men Sunday in connection with the gang rape of a Swiss woman who was on a cycling vacation with her husband in central India. All five men admitted to the attack, which occurred Friday night as the woman and her husband camped out in a forest in Datia district of Madhya Pradesh state, said D. K. Arya, a senior police officer. Another police officer said earlier that six men had been arrested. Arya said police were searching for two more men involved in the attack.

Violence across Iraq on Monday killed five people, including a senior prison official at a jail in the restive north of the country, and wounded 28, security officials said.In the town of Badoush, just outside the main northern city of Mosul, two car bombs at the residential compound for Badoush prison security guards killed two and wounded 16, police Major Khalid Jamal al-Din said."Two car bombs detonated today (Monday) at around 9:00 am (0600 GMT) in a residential compound for prison security guards in Badoush," Din told AFP.