BAGHDAD, Feb 10 (Reuters) – The speaker of Iraq’s parliament
narrowly escaped death on Monday when a roadside bomb exploded
near his convoy close to the northern city of Mosul, his office
said.
Usama al-Nujaifi, one of Iraq’s most senior Sunni Muslim
politicians, was visiting al-Salam area south of Mosul when the
bomb exploded, badly damaging a vehicle carrying his bodyguards,
who were wounded, it said.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
“The speaker’s convoy was targeted by a roadside bomb in an
area with a heavy presence of armed forces,” Nujaifi’s office
said in a statement.
Sunni Islamist militants have been regaining ground in Iraq,
particularly in the western province of Anbar where they overran
two cities on Jan. 1.
Since then, more than 1,000 people have been killed across
the country, building on a trend of intensifying violence that
made last year Iraq’s bloodiest since 2008, when sectarian
warfare began to abate from its height.
In a separate incident, a car bomb exploded near a coffee
shop in a mainly Shi’ite district of southern Baghdad,
killing three people, police and medical sources said. An army
colonel was also killed by a bomb attached to his vehicle in
central Baghdad, police said.
Near the northern city of Samarra, police said residents of
al-Jillam village heard a powerful blast on Sunday evening and
when police went to the site on Monday morning, they found the
remains of a car bomb with pools of blood nearby.
Police said the scene suggested militants had been preparing
an explosive device that blew up prematurely.
“Residents told us they counted 10 to 12 bodies of gunmen
near the blast when they arrived, but hours later bodies were
evacuated by a group of gunmen,” federal police captain Ali
Abbas said.
(Reporting by Ghazwan Hassan; Writing by Ahmed Rasheed; Editing
by Janet Lawrence)
