18 killed by Iraq car bomb

BAGHDAD - A suicide car bomb blast killed 18 people, including 10 police, in the northern city of Kirkuk on Tuesday, and mortars landed near the US ambassador to Iraq during a ceremony in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit.

The bomber detonated his explosives-laden car next to a group of police vehicles on the main road leading south from Kirkuk to Baghdad shortly after sunset. Police Colonel Borhan Tayyib Taha said 28 people were wounded in the blast.

Ambulances ferried the worst cases to hospitals in Kirkuk, where distraught relatives gathered to search for loved ones.

Police said they expected the toll to rise as many of those injured were badly wounded.

Kirkuk is a mixed Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen city that has seen frequent episodes of violence, some the result of tensions between the separate communities, all of whom claim ownership of the city, which lies close to vast oil reserves.

The blast follows a string of suicide bombs across the country in the past five days in the build up to elections set for December 15. At least 180 people have been killed since Friday, including 77 Shi'ite Muslims blown up in twin suicide bombings on mosques in the mixed Kurdish and Shi'ite city of Khanaqin.

Tuesday's attack came hours after insurgents fired two mortars at a complex of palaces built by Saddam in Tikrit, where US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad was attending a ceremony handing the palaces back to the Iraqi government.

No one was injured by the blasts, which the US military said failed to detonate properly, but television pictures showed US soldiers and Marines, as well as Khalilzad and other dignitaries, diving for cover during a panicked few seconds.

General George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, was also attending the ceremony.

"This is a phenomenon existing in the country. We are used to it," Khalilzad told reporters after security guards had rushed him to a safer place and then brought him back.

PRE-ELECTION VIOLENCE

Violence has been on the increase in the run-up to the polls and tensions between Iraq's majority Shi'ite Muslim community and the minority Sunni Arabs have also soared, with many of the most recent attacks clearly sectarian in nature.

Political analysts say the discovery 10 days ago of a secret detention facility run by the Shi'ite-led Interior Ministry and mainly housing Sunni Arab prisoners who were beaten and ill-fed has ratcheted up tensions on all sides.

The US military and Iraqi security forces have stepped up operations around the country, but particularly in the lawless western province of Anbar, to try to impose better security ahead of the elections and ensure people can vote safely.

On Saturday, US and Iraqi forces surrounded a house in the northern city of Mosul and engaged militants in a firefight before some of those inside blew themselves up.

Iraqi authorities said they believed the eight killed inside were senior militant leaders, but the US military on Tuesday quashed speculation that Jordanian militant ringleader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may have been among them.

"I have absolutely no reason to believe that he was one of those that were killed," US Army General John Vines, the No. 2 US commander in Iraq, said, speaking to Pentagon reporters via teleconference from Iraq.

"I am told that there is a DNA database of some of his relatives that is able to be compared against some of those who were killed there. So my expectation is, if he had been in one of those houses that were part of the objective, we could confirm that."

Zarqawi, whose al Qaeda in Iraq group claimed responsibility for the hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan earlier this month that killed 60 people, has masterminded some of the deadliest attacks in Iraq over the past two years.

He has said in internet postings in the past that it is his intention to sew sectarian discord in Iraq, setting Shi'ites against Sunnis to provoke civil war, and his group is suspected of being behind the recent spate of sectarian-style attacks.

Intense security controls are expected to be imposed in the coming days and weeks, ahead of the elections and the next stage in the trial of Saddam and seven other defendants on November 28, as militants have used such events to stage attacks in the past.

- REUTERS