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Three teachers among six killed in Iraq: police
Six people, including three teachers and the brothers of a town mayor, were killed on Friday in three separate attacks in Iraq, police said.
Six people, including three teachers and the brothers of a town mayor, were killed on Friday in three separate attacks in Iraq, police said.
The teachers, who were working with Iraq's census authorities, were found shot dead in the west of the restive city of Mosul, 350 kilometres (220 miles) north of Baghdad, according to a police officer who did not want to be named.
Two brothers of Mustafa al-Azawi, the Sunni Arab mayor of the town of Mansuriyah in Diyala province, meanwhile, were kidnapped Friday morning, police said. Their bodies were found shortly afterwards in the central Iraqi town.
And in the town of Rabiyaa, near the Syrian border in north Iraq, a Kurdish peshmerga fighter was killed and 10 others wounded by a car bomb targeting their patrol at around midday, officials said.
The latest violence follows a spate of attacks across Iraq on Thursday in which dozens of people died.
A hospital official put the final toll from twin bomb attacks at a bus station in the southern town of Hilla on Thursday at 19 dead and 80 wounded, up from an earlier death toll of 15.
With powerful car bomb attacks in Baghdad that killed more than 100 people, a spate of attacks on Christians in northern Iraq and on Shiite pilgrims making their way to the central city of Karbala for this weekend's Ashura ceremonies, December is proving to be an especially violent month in Iraq.
November, by contrast, was the least bloody month in the country since the US-led invasion of 2003, with a total of 122 people killed -- 88 civilians, 22 policemen and 12 soldiers -- according to official figures.
The commander of US forces in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, has predicted a rise in the number of attacks ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for March 7.
