Baghdad - Insurgents killed three police officers in three separate attacks in and around the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Monday, police there said. Four policemen were also wounded in the attacks, police in Mosul, some 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, told the German Press Agency dpa.
A sniper fatally shot one policeman in downtown Mosul early in the morning, they said.
Not long after, gunmen shot a policeman in the eastern Mosul neighbourhood of al-Quds, "killing him before fleeing the scene," a source in the Mosul police department's central operations room told dpa.
A third policeman was killed and four others wounded when a roadside bomb exploded as they patrolled the Wadi Hajar district to the west of the city.
The attacks followed a car bomb outside a police station in the city centre on Sunday evening. At least 15 people were injured in that attack, police said, making it the most serious attack in Iraq since US soldiers withdrew from Iraqi cities and towns on June 30.
Mosul, the capital of Iraq's Nineveh province, which is home to one of the most diverse mix of ethnic and religious groups in Iraq, remains the site of deadly, near-daily attacks.
In recent weeks, there have been signs of a brewing political confrontation between Kurds and Arabs in the region around the city revolving around whether and how the city and its governance should be divided between various ethnic groups.
