BAGHDAD: Five people were killed in violence in Baghdad and central Iraq on Monday, including a roadside bomb targeting a junior minister, medical and security officials said.
A convoy transporting Fuad al-Mussawi, a deputy minister of science and technology, struck a bomb along a road in the upscale neighborhood of Jadriyah, in the centre of the capital.
The minister was unharmed, but the early morning blast killed one of his guards and wounded four other people, said an interior ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Also in central Baghdad, an employee of a telephone exchange was killed and another wounded by a bomb which detonated near Al-Alwiyah communications centre in Karrada.
And in Diyala province, north of the capital, a bomb attack killed three people in the ethnically mixed town of Jalawlah, in a tract of disputed land claimed both by the autonomous Kurdistan region and Iraq’s central government.
An initial magnetic "sticky bomb" attached to a car, which appeared to be targeting Kurdish peshmerga security forces, detonated but did not cause any casualties, Diyala operations command said.
When police arrived at the scene, a second bomb detonated, killing one two policemen and a civilian, and wounding 18 others, including 11 police.
