BAGHDAD: Blasts at Baghdad’s police academy and in the northern city of Mosul killed 30 people and wounded dozens more yesterday, hours after a roadside bomb wounded a senior Iraqi official.

Violence has fallen sharply over the past year as successive security crackdowns dealt insurgent groups a heavy blow, but officials say militants are now concentrating their efforts on attention-grabbing attacks ahead of elections next year. The attacks were likely aimed at reigniting sectarian bloodshed between Sunnis and Shiites.

People were queuing at the back entrance of the police academy in east Baghdad to enroll when a car bomb exploded, followed minutes later by a suicide bomb attack, police said.

Fifteen Iraqi policemen or police recruits were killed and 45 other people were wounded, some of them police. The US military said the suicide bomber’s vest was packed with ball bearings.

Shortly after the Baghdad attacks, police said a suicide car bomber and a car bomb killed 15 people and wounded 37 in Mosul, which officials say is the last holdout for Al-Qaeda and other insurgents who once controlled swaths of Iraq.

The attack in Mosul targeted an Iraqi police and US military joint patrol, police said. The US military said no US troops were casualties of the attack. Mosul’s main hospital said it had received 15 bodies.

Earlier, Maj. Gen. Mudhar Al-Mawla, an official dealing with the transfer of patrolmen to government control, was targeted by a roadside bomb as his convoy left his home in north Baghdad’s Sulaikh district. The bomb killed three people and wounded 13. Mawla was also seriously hurt.

S. Koreans leave

Meanwhile, South Korean troops ended their reconstruction mission in Iraq yesterday, part of an exodus from a dwindling US-led coalition.

The South Koreans are among troops from 13 countries being sent home in advance of the Dec. 31 expiration of the UN mandate that authorized military operations in Iraq.

The first South Korean “Zaytun” contingent was sent to Irbil in September 2004 with 3,600 troops. About 520 troops will be part of this month’s withdrawal.

The pullout will begin tomorrow and conclude by Dec. 20.

At its height, the coalition numbered about 300,000 soldiers from 38 countries — 250,000 from the United States, about 40,000 from Britain, and the rest ranging from 2,000 Australians to 70 Albanians.