BAGHDAD, 14 June 2005 — Bomb attacks and discovery of tortured bodies in Iraq raised the specter of sectarian violence in the strife -torn country. Fourteen Iraqis, many of them members of the local security forces, were killed in attacks and fighting with insurgents yesterday, security sources said.

Seven bodies were found, many of which bore signs of torture, bringing to 27 the grim tally of murdered cadavers found in recent days.

In the deadliest attack three soldiers were killed and five others wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a checkpoint outside an army base in Samarra, north of Baghdad, police said.

Another soldier was killed in Samarra when a bomb exploded in the path of his vehicle, police said.

The attacks came as two Iraqi police commandos and two soldiers were killed in fighting that pitted more than 70 insurgents against members of the security forces in Samarra, Lt. Col. Mahmud Mohammed said.

In Baghdad, two Iraqis were killed and five others wounded in a car bombing targeting an American patrol in the west of the city, an Interior Ministry source said.

“American helicopters evacuated wounded soldiers,” he said, although the US military was not immediately able to confirm the report. Two Iraqi policemen were killed and 17 others, including five police, were wounded by a suicide car bomb attack in former dictator Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.

Also yesterday a member of Iraq’s infrastructure protection force was shot dead near the northern oil refinery town of Baiji, and an Iraqi businessman was gunned down as he left a US base at the airport in Dhuluiyah.

Six bodies were found in Baghdad, most of which showed signs of torture, police said, while another body of Iraqi soldier was discovered in a tributary of the Tigris River in Dur.

“Three bodies, including two policemen brothers, were discovered in Baladiyat, in eastern Baghdad,” on Sunday, a police source said.

“Two of the people were wearing underwear and the third a dishdasha (traditional robe),” he said, adding that “the two policemen were kidnapped on Saturday and their bodies showed signs of torture.”

“Three other unidentified bodies were found in a car parked under a bridge in Dulai, in northern Baghdad,” he said. “The three victims, shot dead, were blindfolded, had their hands tied and bore signs of torture.”

Police said on Sunday they had found the decomposed bodies of 20 executed men who had been bound and blindfolded, near Nahrawan, southeast of the capital.

A senior US diplomat survived yesterday when a suicide car bomber struck a US military convoy in Baghdad, several police sources said.

The US official’s identity was unclear. It was not clear if he was specifically the target and a US Embassy spokesman said he was unaware of the incident.

A spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, a major Sunni Muslim grouping, said a senior US official had just left its compound in western Baghdad when the explosion went off.

In another development, gunmen kidnapped a Kurdish women’s rights activist, Jaymon Qadir, in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, a Kurdish political party said yesterday.