Multiple blasts heard in Baghdad

Smoke is seen rising from the Green Zone.

By News Agencies

Also on Monday at least 40 people were reported killed in attacks across Iraq.

A bomber wearing an explosives belt blew himself up inside a funeral tent in a province north of Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 23 people and wounding 30, officials said.

The attack at 6:30pm was on a Shia family holding a funeral in Khalis, a flashpoint Shia city in Diyala province.

Ibrahim Abdullah, a doctor at the local hospital, said 20 people died and 30 were wounded.

Earlier in the day in Baghdad, a bomber blew up a vehicle outside a police headquarters, killing five people and wounding 12, a security official said.

Elsewhere in the capital, a former brigadier-general in Saddam Hussein’s army was shot dead in the Dura neighbourhood, and three civilians were killed in two separate roadside bombings.

The two blasts left 10 people wounded, security and medical sources said.

At least one person was killed and six wounded in a car bombing in the southwestern neighbourhood of al-Bayaa, the site of several recent attacks, while one person was killed and nine wounded by three mortar rounds in al-Shaab neighbourhood.

Bodies

The bodies of another three people killed in a gunfight in the capital were brought to al-Yarmuk hospital in west Baghdad, the hospital said.

A man is treated at al-Yarmuk hospital [AFP]

Further south, armed men ambushed a checkpoint outside Kut, killing two policemen before fleeing, police said, while earlier the authorities found six corpses, two of them decapitated, in an area north of the city.

In Mosul, the authorities arrested 61 suspected fighters following an overnight shootout at a police station.

A remotely detonated car bomb exploded near some reinforcements who were racing to the scene, killing one policeman and wounding two.

In other parts of the country 77 more people were arrested.

US death

Five US soldiers were killed in separate attacks in Baghdad and west of the capital over weekend, the military announced on Monday, pushing the death toll past 100 in the deadliest month for the US so far this year.

Two attacks occurred in eastern Baghdad, a predominantly Shia area where US and Iraqi forces have stepped up operations as part of the security crackdown that began on February 14.

A marine also was killed in al-Anbar province.