AFP: Two car bombs targeting a provincial councillor and a police officer north of Baghdad on Friday killed five people and wounded 79, many of them women or children, police said.
KIRKUK, June 18, 2010 (AFP) – Two car bombs targeting a provincial councillor and a police officer north of Baghdad on Friday killed five people and wounded 79, many of them women or children, police said.
The five dead came in a bombing in the town of Tuz Khurmatu and targeted the home of Niazar Nomaroglu, a Shiite Turkmen councillor in mainly Sunni Arab Salaheddin province, police Colonel Hussein al-Bayati said.
Women and children were among the 47 people wounded in the 3:45 pm (1245 GMT) bombing, which severely damaged several surrounding houses as well as Nomaroglu’s home, Bayati said.
It was unclear whether the councillor was among the casualties.
Salaheddin province has its headquarters in heavily Sunni Arab Tikrit, hometown of now executed dictator Saddam Hussein, but the province also has Kurdish and Shiite Turkmen minorities, particularly on its eastern margins.
Earlier, a car bomb targeting the home of police Captain Mustafa al-Tamimi in Baquba wounded 32 people, 20 of them women or children, a spokesman for the city’s operations command said.
“His house was completely destroyed,” the spokesman said.
“Three of his children, his wife and two brothers were among the wounded. The rest included nine women and seven children.”
The police officer himself escaped injury as he was at the mosque attending the main weekly Muslim prayers.
Baquba is the capital of ethnically and confessionally divided Diyala province, which has become one of the bastions of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
