Car bombs strike Baghdad, killing eight

BAGHDAD - Three car bombs have killed at least eight people in Baghdad, putting more pressure on a five-day old government Iraqis hope will quell the bloodshed.

The blasts targeted an Interior Ministry official, policemen and a busy shopping district, police said. Officials say attacks have killed about 100 people since the first democratically elected government in 50 years was formed on Thursday.

In the northern city of Mosul, an important guerrilla stronghold, two suicide bombers blew themselves up, killing a child and wounding 15 people, the US military said.

Iraqis who risked the threat of suicide bombings to vote in a historic election on Jan. 30 had hoped to be rewarded with stability and a decline in violence on their streets.

But their bickering leaders took three months to form a government and the guerrillas show no signs of weakening.

Monday's first bomb exploded in the Huriya district of northwest Baghdad as a small convoy of vehicles carrying Major General Fuleih Rasheed, the head of a police commando unit linked to the Interior Ministry, was passing.

Iraq's al Qaeda wing claimed responsibility in an internet statement for the bombing, which police said wounded Rasheed and three of his bodyguards. None of the injuries was believed to be life-threatening.

"(We tell) the criminal...Fuleih...there is no success in this life or the next to allies of Jews and Christians," said the statement, which could not be immediately authenticated.

The second blast hit Karrada, a busy neighbourhood in the south of the capital. Police said the bomb killed at least six passers-by, wounded 12 people, devastated a row of shops and set a five-storey apartment building on fire.

A third blast, also claimed by al Qaeda, struck in Baghdad's Zayouna district, killing two policemen and wounding 10 people.

Violence has deepened sectarian tensions since Shi'ites and Kurds became the dominant groups in Iraq while the election marginalised the Sunnis who dominated under Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi officials and ordinary citizens play down sectarian troubles, but the carnage has raised fears of civil war in Iraq, an oil producer whose economy has been wrecked by violence.

A British soldier also died in combat on Monday, Britain's Ministry of Defence said.

RELENTLESS CAR BOMBINGS

The latest bloodshed has included more than 15 car bombings in Baghdad and dozens of attacks elsewhere.

Most of the bombs have been aimed at Iraqi security forces, but they have also killed scores of civilians, including children. About 150 people have been injured.

On Sunday a suicide bomber rammed his car into a funeral procession for a Kurdish official in the northern town of Tal Afar, killing at least 30 people and wounding around 50.

Apart from suicide car bombings that are very difficult to prevent, militants are pressing on with a campaign of hostage-taking.

An Australian hostage flanked by masked gunmen pleaded for his life in a tape released on Sunday. He was the latest of more than 150 foreigners taken captive in Iraq over the past year -- alongside thousands of Iraqis kidnapped for ransom.

On the video, a man identifying himself as Douglas Wood, a 63-year-old Australian who lives in California, appealed to the United States, Britain and Australia to pull their troops out of Iraq so that his life would be spared.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he would send an emergency response team to Iraq to try to free the hostage, but would not withdraw his country's troops.

"We can't have the foreign policy of this country dictated by terrorists, but we have got to do everything we can, nonetheless, to assist this poor man," he said.

Three Romanian journalists kidnapped in Iraq on March 28 were still alive on Monday, five days after Wednesday's deadline for their execution, President Traian Basescu said.

The abductors had said they would kill the captives -- Prima TV reporter Marie Jeanne Ion, 32; cameraman Sorin Miscoci, 30; and Ovidiu Ohanesian, a 37-year-old journalist for the daily Romania Libera -- unless Romania withdrew its 800 troops.

- REUTERS