TIKRIT: A huge bomb tore through the home of an Iraqi police officer in Tikrit before dawn Tuesday, killing eight members of his family as they slept, including a two-year-old girl, police said.
The powerful blast was one of a spate of attacks across Iraq on Tuesday which also saw two policemen killed and 12 Iranian pilgrims wounded, police and an interior ministry official said.
The bomb in Tikrit, the home town in central Iraq of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, exploded at around 3:00 am, destroying the house of lieutenant colonel Qais Rashid, brigade commander of a rapid-response force, police said.
Those who died in the blast were Rashid’s father, brother, brother-in-law and sister-in-law and three other women, as well as a two-year-old girl.
Two other family members were wounded in the attack.
Two policemen meanwhile were killed and two wounded in a bomb blast at a checkpoint in the city of Samarra, about 110 kilometers (70 miles) north of Baghdad, according to the interior ministry official.
In Baghdad, magnetic "sticky" bombs, which attach to vehicles and have increasingly become a weapon of choice for insurgents, targeted two buses carrying Iranian pilgrims, an interior ministry official said.
Eight Iranians in one bus and four in another were wounded in the early morning attacks in different parts of the capital.
The attacks against Iranian pilgrims came a day after Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki paid a short visit to Tehran, where he sought to drum up support for a second term in office.
Authorities upped security measures in response, and armed police were seen stopping and checking every busload of Iranian pilgrims at the capital’s many, congested checkpoints.
Every day about 1,500 pilgrims from neighboring Iran visit Shia shrines in Iraq, mainly in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.
Violence in Iraq has plunged dramatically since its peak in 2006-2007 but casualties from insurgent and military action still remain part of daily life.
Political and sectarian tensions between Iraq’s majority Shia population and large minority Sunni numbers have been running high since the 2003 US-led invasion.
