Baghdad - At least three people were killed, including a family, and three wounded in separate attacks, as violence flared across Iraq on Wednesday, witnesses and police said. In one incident, police and witnesses said a bomb attack killed two and injured three people all from the same family in the northern city of Kirkuk.
Gunmen stormed a house in a village near Kirkuk, 250 kilometres north of Baghdad, police told the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency.
The assailants using automatic machine guns killed two people and injured three.
In Baghdad, US and Iraqi soldiers detonated explosives near Ali al-Azim mosque in the southern Zafaraniyah district, witnesses told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
US and Iraqi army vehicles stopped traffic on a main road near the mosque.
Separately, the US military said Wednesday a rescue team found the wreckage Tuesday of an Iraqi military helicopter, which was reported missing.
The eight people on board, including a US soldier, were all killed in the crash. The last reported contact with the Russian-made Mi-17 was at 2.40 pm local time on Monday.
In another development, an Iraqi academic with New Zealand nationality was killed by gunmen in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, police said.
Abdel-Sattar Taher Sharif, a professor at Kirkuk University, was shot dead by assailants in the Shirwah district, Major-General Sarhad Qadir from the local police told dpa.
Sharif, a 74-year-old Iraqi Kurd, had been living in New Zealand, the nationality of which he adopted. He served as a labour minister in Iraq in the mid-1970s and worked as an academic in several Iraqi universities.
The attack spotlights the ongoing assault on Iraqi academics and professionals since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
At least 40 per cent of Iraqi academics fled the country in the three years following the invasion, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think-tank.
Other professionals, mainly wealthy doctors, have been targeted for abductions to extort money.
In other news, Turkish military helicopters attacked positions of Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels in northern Iraq for the first time since Turkey ended a big offensive nearly a week ago, border guard sources said.
The helicopters attacked Biraz Gir valley, an uninhabited mountainous area on the border triangle between Iraq, Turkey and Iraq, a source from the Iraqi border guard told dpa.
No reports of casualties or damage were immediately available.
Biraz Jir is in the province of Arbil in Iraq's Kurdish Autonomous Region.
The Turkish army ended an eight-day military offensive against PKK positions in northern Iraq on Friday.
