BAGHDAD, 28 March 2004 — Six people were killed and 26 wounded yesterday as UN experts conferred with the US-led coalition ahead of meetings with Iraqi leaders on the troubled blueprint for the transfer of power to this summer.
In fresh violence to sweep the country, a Katyusha rocket attack on the provincial governor’s office in the northern city of Mosul killed four Iraqis, including a 13-year-old girl and two women, and wounded 19 others.
In Baghdad, seven Iraqi bodyguards, who had been headed to escort coalition advisers, were wounded by a roadside bomb.
In Kirkuk, an Iraqi police colonel was shot dead by unknown gunmen, the head of the police force in the northern city, Brig. Gen. Torhan Yussef, said.
“Gunmen fired assault-rifles at police Colonel Romeo Slewa Badwari as he was stepping out of his house at 2:15 p.m. (1315 GMT) in Al-Nasr neighborhood in central Kirkuk,” Yussef told AFP.
In Tikrit, US forces fired on a civilian car killing a three-year old boy and wounding six women and children as well as their male driver, Iraqi police and relatives said. Police said US soldiers based in Saddam Hussein’s hometown, 175 km north of Baghdad, shot at the family’s red car in the town on Friday night.
Meanwhile, in the flash point town of Fallujah west of Baghdad, US troops continued to carry out raids to track down insurgents and distributed leaflets threatening that wanted people would be “found and brought before justice.”
Unrest also rocked the southeastern city of Amara as angry protesters demanding work threw stones and lobbed grenades at the public job center, forcing British troops to intervene, police and an AFP correspondent said.
About 500 people gathered outside the building, part of the social security directorate in Amara, 365 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, the sources said.
“The protesters threw stones and sound grenades at the building where police forces had been deployed,” Police Captain Shahid Abed Ali Al-Tamimi said.
