KARBALA, Iraq - At least seven people were killed when a bomb exploded Wednesday in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Karbala, raising the death toll from a string of deadly attacks ahead of January's general elections.
Seven people were killed and 32 others wounded when a blast ripped through the pilgrimage city near the Shiite mausoleum of Imam Hussein, the revered grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, police said.
Sheikh Abdel Mehdi Karbalai, the local representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, spiritual head of Iraq's Shiite majority, was seriously wounded and admitted to intensive care after the bombing, a senior medic said.
Elsewhere, the bodies of six murdered men and women were found in the so-called triangle of death, south of Baghdad, said residents who discovered the corpses in Mazraa.
"All had been shot in the head, and the women also had their throats slashed," said one witness who asked not to be named.
The victims did not appear to be local residents, they said.
In Saddam Hussein's home province of Salaheddin, a police captain was killed and two colleagues were wounded Wednesday when assailants fired on their motorway patrol, said Lieutenant Colonel Jassem Mohammed Mehdi.
In another attack, three Iraqis were killed when a roadside bomb exploded in Moqdadia, northeast of the Sunni Muslim troublespot of Baquba, said a spokesman from an Iraqi-US information center.
The bomb was so powerful that two of the victims were torn to pieces and the car they were travelling in was completely gutted.
Also north of the Iraqi capital, a woman engineer and her husband were kidnapped outside her workplace at the train station in the oil refinery town of Baiji, police said.
The latest unrest came after deadly attacks Tuesday in which four policemen were killed and 13 others went missing when gunmen ambushed their convoy in a notoriously dangerous area south of Baghdad. Another 20 policemen were wounded.
Further north, two Turkish truck drivers carrying goods destined for a US military base were killed in an ambush late Tuesday near Balad, not far from Baquba, police said.
In the main northern city of Mosul, a Lebanese was also killed Tuesday when a shell fell on a house where he was visiting friends, government sources said in Beirut.
Overnight, a five-year-old girl died in the Sunni bastion of Samarra, north of Baghdad, after being caught in a shoot-out between US soldiers and rebels, hospital officials said.
Out west, a US marine was killed Tuesday in the restive Al-Anbar province, home to the Sunni rebel bastion of Fallujah, the US military said Wednesday.
He was the 12th US soldier killed since Saturday in renewed violence, mostly in the Fallujah area where US and Iraqi forces launched a blistering attack early last month in a bid to wrest the city from insurgents.
South of Baghdad on Tuesday, marines killed three suspected rebels and captured 13 others as they were laying a roadside bomb, the military said.
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