By DPA
Baghdad : At least 137 people were killed in three suicide attacks Friday evening and early Saturday in northern Iraq, according to witnesses and hospital sources.
At least 100 Iraqis were killed Saturday and more than 120 injured when a truck bomb blast rocked a busy market in the northern town of Tuz Khurmato in Tikrit province, 170 km north of the capital Baghdad.
The initial death toll was said to be 30 but Hassan Zein al-Abbedin, the head of Tikrit's health department, told reporters that the number of dead had risen to 100 because of the blast's intensity.
Iraq's interior ministry, which is usually more cautious in announcing the number of victims following an attack, has not disclosed an official count yet.
At least 20 Kurds were killed and 10 more injured in Khanaqin, 180 km northeast of Baghdad, when a suicide bomber drove a vehicle into a funeral cortege Friday evening, police sources said.
Khanaqin is populated mainly by Kurds, but is in Diyala province and outside the Kurdish autonomous region where the security situation is more stable.
Also near Khanaqin, 17 people had been killed and eight wounded in an overnight suicide attack in the remote village of Gluelaa, a local police source told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq.
The attacker, driving an explosives-packed car, targeted a local market, causing major damage to shops and vehicles in the area, the police said.
Saturday afternoon, the Association of Muslim scholars, a leading Sunni authority in Iraq, published an Internet statement alleging that 25 people had been kidnapped in southern Iraq.
The kidnappers, members of a "sectarian terrorist militia," according to the statement, had set up a fake checkpoint near al-Askari district in the southern area of Mahmudiya in order to capture the 25.
Local authorities did not confirm this incident.
Also Saturday, the US military announced that at least four US servicemen were killed and six wounded in operations across the Iraqi capital.
In one incident, a soldier was killed Friday when a roadside bomb struck his patrol southeast of Baghdad, the US military said. An Iraqi interpreter was also killed while three US soldiers were wounded.
Also Friday, two soldiers were killed and three wounded by a roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad while another US soldier was killed by a bomb in the west of the capital Thursday.