Suicide truck bomber kills as many as 18 near Falluja

BAGHDAD: As many as 18 people were killed south of Falluja on Tuesday when a suicide bomber driving a truck packed with high explosives plowed into a busy commercial district. The attack also wounded at least 15 people, according to a local Iraqi police official.

An American military spokesman put the toll at 15 killed and 13 wounded.

A security official in Anbar Province said that just hours after the attack in Falluja, another suicide bomber used a truck full of explosives hidden beneath piles of raw wool to attack an Iraqi police checkpoint in eastern Ramadi, killing eight police officers and wounding four more.

But a Marine spokesman, Major Jeff Pool, later said that reports of the bombing were false. "Nothing happened there," he said.

Another suicide bomb attack was foiled in Baghdad when a woman wearing an explosive belt approached a line of Shiite police recruits in the eastern part of the capital but was shot by police commandos. Suspecting the woman was a bomber, the commandos chased her away from the line, an Interior Ministry official said, but her explosive device detonated and wounded three of her pursuers.

Thirty-three corpses were found strewn about Baghdad on Tuesday, most of them shot in the head execution style, as the pace of sectarian killings continues to rise in the capital. Reports of such killings remain well below the peak reached last year, before President George W. Bush sent additional American combat troops into the capital. But American and Iraqi officials have acknowledged that the number of killings is once again on the rise.

In Diyala Province, north of Baghdad, gunmen kidnapped a dozen students traveling in a minibus through Khalis, a police official said. The Mahdi army, the militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, has a large presence in Khalis, but the city has also been the scene of recent attacks by Sunni Arab insurgents.

Another kidnapping attempt in Khalis on Tuesday failed, however, when insurgents who had used a fake checkpoint to abduct 13 people were then attacked and chased by local residents who were later able to free the hostages, the police official said.

In the eastern part of Baquba, the provincial capital of Diyala, one civilian was killed and four were wounded by gunmen. Also, two unidentified corpses and a severed head were found in northern Baquba, the official said.

In the northern city of Mosul, the police recovered four corpses scattered about the city, as clashes erupted between gunmen and the police. Two of the gunmen were killed, one a Saudi and the other an Iraqi, according to Brigadier Saeed al-Jibouri, a police official in Mosul. He said the slain Saudi gunman had documents in his pocket identifying his nationality.

The police in eastern Mosul also discovered a booby-trapped body inside a car, the latest of what the police described as an increasingly common tactic of the insurgents.

Karim Hilmi and Muhanad Seloom contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees contributed from Diyala and Mosul.