Baghdad : At least 36 people were killed and 28 others wounded in separate violent attacks across Iraq Sunday, police said.
In one attack, eight policemen were killed and 10 people wounded in a suicide truck bomb attack targeting police in Iraq’s northern province of Kirkuk, Xinhua quoted a police source as saying.
The attack occurred in the morning when a suicide bomber rammed his explosive-laden truck into a police checkpoint and blew it up in Debis town.
A police officer and a Kurdish security guard were among the killed, the source said, adding the wounded included three civilians.
The ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk is part of the disputed areas claimed by the Kurds and both Arabs and Turkomans.
Elsewhere, a booby-trapped car detonated near a joint army and police patrol while it passed through a busy marketplace in the eastern part of the city of Mosul, leaving five security members and five passers-by killed. The blast also wounded six civilians and two policemen.
Also in the city, Iraqi soldiers shot dead three gunmen who tried to attack their checkpoint. In another attack, two policemen were wounded by a roadside bomb in the southern part of city.
In Salahudin province, gunmen attacked houses at a village near Sulaiman Beg city, some 90 km east of the provincial capital city of Tikrit, and shot dead a member of a government- backed Sahwa paramilitary group and two civilians. Four people were and wounded in the attack.
In a separate incident, a civilian was killed when a roadside bomb struck his car in the city of Shirqat, some 110 km north of Tikrit.
Also in the province, seven people were killed and four wounded when two roadside bombs went off in a quick succession in the city of Dujail, some 110 km south of Tikrit, a source said.
Salahudin province is a Sunni-dominated province and its capital Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, is the hometown of former president Saddam Hussein.
In Iraq’s western province of Anbar, fierce clashes erupted between gunmen and Iraqi army in al-Houz district of the provincial capital city of Ramadi, some 110 km west of Baghdad, leaving three soldiers killed, a police source said.
Also in al-Houz district, a soldier was shot dead by a sniper while he was on patrol in the district.
The violence came just 17 days ahead of the landmark parliamentary elections on April 30. It is the first in the country since the withdrawal of US troops in 2011.