BAGHDAD, 23 February 2004 — An oil pipeline was sabotaged in southern Iraq yesterday while deadly violence flared in the north, as the war-torn country awaited the release today of the UN's findings on the best way forward.
In the northern Iraqi city of Mosul two Iraqis were killed and three wounded in separate attacks, including one against the home of the provincial police chief, the police said yesterday.
"Two armed Iraqis, in a white vehicle, on Saturday night attacked the home of the police chief for Nineveh province, Gen. Mohammad Kahyri Al-Berhawi," police official Hikmat Mahmud Mohammed told AFP.
One attacker was killed and another seriously wounded in ensuing gunbattles with the police chief's guards, he said, adding that automatic weapons, a rocket launcher and three grenades were later found in their vehicle.
As the debate over Iraq's future rages amid fears of a civil war, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned ahead of a trip to the Gulf that Al-Qaeda was sowing seeds of destruction there.
In the first attack of its kind in the south since the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime last spring, an oil pipeline was targeted near Karbala, 110 kilometers from Baghdad, an official Iraqi source said.
"An explosion damaged the pipeline and we don't know who the saboteurs are," said local Karbala official Hamid Salah Al-Shebib.
The blast on the Kirkuk-Baghdad-Basra pipeline set off a fire around the site of the attack and thick black smoke could be seen billowing from kilometers around. Saboteurs have frequently targeted oil pipelines in oil-rich northern Iraq.
