Iraq bombings leave 50 dead

BAGHDAD (Iraq)—A suicide bomber killed at least 36 people and wounded 50 more in an attack Saturday on a Shiite funeral procession north of Baghdad, while a car bomb exploded near a market in a Shiite neighborhood just outside the capital killing 13 people, police said.
The funeral was attacked at sunset when dozens of people were offering condolences to Raad Majid, the head of the municipal council in Abu Saida, for the death of his uncle, police officials said. Abu Saida is near Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.
The suicide attacker drove his car into the gathering and detonated the bomb, the command center said. Ambulances and police rushed from Baqouba, as well as other nearby towns, to help in the rescue operations.
Late Saturday, the provincial police command reported that 36 people were dead and 50 injured in the attack. The Saturday morning market explosion occurred near the Diyala Bridge area just southeast of the Iraqi capital as dozens of people were shopping, police Col. Nouri Ashour said. The dead included five women, he added.
Iraqi police and U.S. soldiers surrounded a house in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad after reports that al-Qaida in Iraq members were inside, said Brig. Said Ahmed al-Jubouri, the spokesman for the Mosul police.
Almost immediately a fierce fire fight broke out and three of the insurgents detonated explosives and killed themselves. Five more died fighting, while four police officers were also killed, he added.
Al-Jubouri said officials were attempting to identify the dead insurgents. A U.S. soldier whose vehicle was deliberately rammed by an Iraqi car on Thursday near the city of Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, has died of his injuries, the U.S. command said Saturday.
The soldier was being treated at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany when he died on Friday, a statement said. The identity of the soldier from the 101st Airborne Division was being withheld until the next of kin was identified.
On Friday, two suicide bombers wandered into the Sheik Murad mosque and the Grand Mosque in the border town of Khanaqin during noon prayers and detonated explosives strapped to their bodies, police and survivors said.—Agencies