Seven people killed in Iraq's violence

Seven people were killed and 17 wounded in separate bomb and gunfire attacks in Baghdad and the Iraqi province of Salahudin on Sunday, the police said.

In Salahudin province, director of Iraqi tax office and a female employee were killed when a sticky bomb attached to their government vehicle detonated in the afternoon in al-Qadsiyah district in northern the city of Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, a provincial police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

In northern the province, the police found a body of a beheaded woman in the town of al-Shirqat, some 250 km north of Baghdad, the source said.

In a separate incident, an explosives expert was wounded while defusing a roadside bomb near Tikrit University, in northern Tikrit, the source added.

Salahudin province, located in northern central of Iraq, is mainly Sunni province. Its capital city of Tikrit is the hometown of the former president Saddam Hussien.

Earlier in the day, an Interior Ministry source reported the killing of a man, his wife and their son in Baghdad's southwestern district of Baiyaa, when gunmen wearing police uniforms at dawn broke into their house and shot them dead.

In a separate incident, a roadside bomb went off in Karrada district in central Baghdad, wounding three civilians, the source said.

Also earlier in the day, the source said that a civilian was killed and 13 others wounded in a barrage of eight Katyusha rockets targeted Baghdad's Green Zone that houses U.S. embassy and some Iraqi government offices, but four of the rockets missed the zone and hit surrounding civilian areas.

In his earlier reports, the source put the toll at 13 wounded by the barrage.

The heavily fortified Green Zone, have been frequently targeted by insurgents' mortar and rocket attacks. The roughly 10 square km zone is located on the west bank of the Tigris River which bisects the Iraqi capital.

Violence and sporadic high-profile bomb attacks continue in the Iraqi cities despite the dramatic decrease of violence over the last three years.

Posted in: Seven people killed in Iraq's violence