Baghdad, June 4 – At least 31 people were killed and 46 others wounded in violence across Iraq Tuesday, police and sources said. The deadliest attack occurred in Iraq’s volatile province of Anbar where 15 people were killed and 40 others got wounded when airstrikes, artillery and mortar shelling struck several neighbourhoods in the militant-seized city of Fallujah, some 50 km west of the capital Baghdad, Xinhua quoted a source as saying.
In addition, a barrage of mortar rounds hit the city municipal office, killing four people and wounding three others, the source added. An Iraqi army force, backed by helicopter gunships clashed with gunmen believed to be linked to the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant, an Al Qaeda breakaway group, in the town of Garma, just east of Fallujah, killing six militants, a police source said.
Also in the province, a policeman was killed and three others wounded when a suicide bomber rammed his explosive laden car into their checkpoint on a bridge, just east of the provincial capital Ramadi, some 110 km west of Baghdad. The huge blast destroyed part of the bridge.
Anbar province has been the scene of fierce clashes that flared up after Iraqi police dismantled an anti-government protest site outside Ramadi last December. Elsewhere, gunmen attacked a car carrying three soldiers and shot them dead on a main road near the city of Baiji, some 200 km north of Baghdad.
In northern Iraq, a policeman was shot dead by gunmen in front of his house in the city of Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad. The morgue of Mosul’s main hospital received in the morning the body of a detainee who died earlier during interrogation in the ant-terrorism department, a medical source said, adding that the investigation into his death is underway.
-INDIA TODAY
