BAGHDAD, 25 March 2006 — Seventeen people were killed in an array of shootings and bombings yesterday in an unusually violent day of prayer in Iraq. Five men were killed and 17 wounded when a bomb exploded amongst a crowd of Sunni Arab faithful leaving a mosque after Friday prayers, northeast of Baghdad, police said. The attack took place outside the Saad Ibn Abi Waqqas Mosque, in Khalis, 80 kilometers from the capital.
Just south of the capital in Mahmudiya, in the notorious “triangle of death,” gunmen burst into a house and killed four family members, leaving the mother wounded. Police were not clear whether the family was Sunni or Shiite, but the mixed area is known for its sectarian killings. In the southern port city of Basra, a Sunni was shot dead by unidentified gunmen, also on leaving a local mosque after prayers. Sectarian violence has been on the rise in Iraq since Feb. 22 when a bomb destroyed a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of the capital. In Baghdad, where bodies are now found on a daily basis, 15 corpses were recovered yesterday, 12 of them in the east and northeast of the city, and three others in the west, an Interior Ministry official said. They had been tortured and shot.
In other violence yesterday, seven people, three of them policemen, were killed in the capital. Gunmen raided a bakery in the south of the capital, shooting dead four employees and wounding a fifth. When police arrived on the scene, a roadside bomb exploded killing one police officer and wounding another. Gunmen also ambushed police in the west of the city, shooting dead two and wounding one.
