A suicide bomber blew himself up among American troops in central Baghdad on Monday, killing five and injuring three. The U.S. military said in a statement that the explosion, which also injured an Iraqi interpreter, hit the troops while they were on foot patrol. Iraqi police said at least nine Iraqis were wounded.
According to Reuters, the military blamed the attack on a suicide bomber. Police, citing witness accounts, said the soldiers had been walking in a main street in the upscale Mansour district when a man wearing an explosives vest walked up to them and blew himself up. "We remain resolute in our resolve to protect the people of Iraq and kill or capture those who would bring them harm," Colonel Allen Batschelet, chief of staff of U.S. forces in Baghdad, said in a statement after Monday's attack.
The statement said four soldiers were killed in the blast and one died later of wounds.
Elsewhere, a female suicide bomber blew herself up Monday near a tribal sheikh's house northeast of Baghdad, killing the sheikh and two other people, a provincial police official said. The woman, wearing an explosives belt, entered the house of Sheikh Thaeir Ghadhban al-Karkhi in the predominantly Sunni town of Kanaan, about 12 miles east of Baqouba in Iraq's restive Diyala province, a police official said, according to the AP.
The official said the sheikh died, along with a child and a security guard. Two other people were hurt.
On Sunday, four people were killed and several others injured in separate attacks in Iraq, Iraqi security officials said. Two people died and five others were hurt in a car bomb attack against an Iraqi army and police patrol in the northern city of Mosul, police Brigadier General Khalid Abdul Sattar said, according to AFP.
In the central city of Tikrit, a police officer was killed and two policemen wounded when a roadside bomb detonated near their checkpoint, police said. In Baghdad, a civilian was killed and another wounded in a similar roadside bomb attack in the southern neighbourhood of Zafaraniyah, a security official said.
