Overnight mortar attack kills 2 Iraqi soldiers at Baghdad security station
By Hamid Ahmed, APTuesday, April 27, 2010
Mortar fire kills 2 Iraqi soldiers at Baghdad post
BAGHDAD — An overnight mortar attack killed two Iraqi soldiers Tuesday at a security station in a Shiite neighborhood of northern Baghdad, police and hospitals officials said.
Another 14 people, including an army colonel, were wounded in the 1 a.m. attack on the joint Iraqi army-police office in the capital’s Hurriyah area, the officials said.
Three mortar shells hit the security station, according to two Iraqi police officials. A hospital official confirmed the casualties. All three officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks.
It was the second big attack in Hurriyah in less than a week.
Last Friday, a car bomb at the district’s Hadi al-Chalabi mosque killed eight people and wounded 19. The bombing was part of what appeared to be a coordinated strike on Shiite worshippers across Baghdad.
In all, 72 people were killed and hundreds more wounded in the Friday bombings, which also targeted Sunni police officials in the country’s western Anbar province.
Also Tuesday, unidentified gunmen in a speeding car opened fire on an Iraqi soldier in the northern city of Kirkuk, police said.
Kirkuk police Col. Ahmed Shameran identified the victim as Khalil Ibrahim, a 27-year-old army lieutenant who was attending Kirkuk University.
An unidentified person with Ibrahim was injured. Kirkuk is about 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of Baghdad.
In the northern city of Mosul, a drive-by shooter targeted a police checkpoint late Tuesday, killing one policeman and wounding another, said a police official who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
A grenade was lobbed at a passing police patrol in another part of Mosul, 225 miles (360 kilometers) northwest of Baghdad. The grenade missed its target but wounded a civilian passer-by, the same police official said.
