Baghdad - At least 32 people were killed and 51 injured in acts of violence across Iraq, including twin bombings targeting security forces in Baghdad, while US troops found a mass grave containing 14 bodies, Iraqi and US officials said Monday. In the deadlier of the Baghdad bombings, at least 15 people were killed and 35 injured.
A suicide bomber driving a car detonated it near a checkpoint jointly manned by police and members of the Awakening Councils in Midan in central Baghdad's Bab al-Muadham district, Major-General Qasim Atta, the spokesman for the city's security operation, told the Voices of Iraqi (VOI) news agency.
The attack occurred on a road leading to the ministry of housing. Bab al-Muadham is a shopping area on the east bank of the Tigris River.
The Awakening Councils are US-backed tribal police recruited to fight loyalists of the al-Qaeda terrorist network in Sunni Arab areas.
In south-east Baghdad, another suicide bomber driving a car attacked a checkpoint manned by the Iraqi army in Ghadir district. Two civilians were killed and three wounded in the attack, Atta said.
In yet another attack on Monday, gunmen in three vehicles shot dead a senior police officer from the city of Nasiriyah, Major- General Qasim Falih, and three security personnel in central Basra, police sources said.
The sources did not say what the officer was doing in Basra.
In another incident, at least four people were killed and four injured when British forces responded with artillery to a rocket attack on their base at Basra airport in southern Iraq, a local official said.
The artillery shelling by British troops hit the Hussein residential area in Basra, 550 kilometres south of Baghdad, Akil al- Friji, a member of Basra's municipal council, told Deutsche Presse- Agentur dpa.
A house was destroyed and several others were damaged.
Britain handed over security responsibility in Basra province to Iraqi forces in December, but it still maintains about 4,500 soldiers at the airport outside the city.
In northern Iraq, a lorry bomb killed seven people and injured nine, some of them women and children, west of the city of Samarra, police told VOI.
In a separate development in Samarra, US soldiers found on Sunday a grave containing 14 people, believed to be members of the Iraqi security forces.
All the victims had been shot in the head and had their hands tied behind their backs, the US military said.
