A suicide bomber attacked a police station in Iraq's province of Diyala on Wednesday, killing at least four policeman. Wednesday's blast, which also wounded at least 16 people, occurred at the front gate of the police station in a marketplace in Balad Ruz city, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, police said. All fatalities were policemen and the wounded included 11 civilians and five policemen, authorities said, according to the AP.
In other violence Wednesday, a roadside bomb hit a U.S. military convoy in Baiyaa, a mixed Sunni-Shiite area of southwest Baghdad, setting fire to one of its Humvees, police said.
Despite that U.S. and Iraqi troops launched a massive security crackdown in Baghdad in February, a U.N. report released Wednesday said that violence in Baghdad remains at high levels.
In its first human rights report since the security plan was launched on Feb. 14 the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) said civilian casualties in the daily violence between January and March remained high, concentrated in and around Baghdad.
Additionally, UNAMI reported that for the first time since it started issuing quarterly reports on the human rights situation in Iraq, the new Jan. 1 through March 31 report did not contain overall death figures from Iraq's Ministry of Health because it refused to release them.
The U.N. agency said the reason appeared to be that after the publication of its last human rights report on Jan. 16, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office told UNAMI its mortality figures were exaggerated, "although they were in fact official figures compiled and provided by a government ministry."
"UNAMI emphasizes again the utmost need for the Iraqi government to operate in a transparent manner, and does not accept the government's suggestion that UNAMI used the (previous) mortality figures in an inappropriate fashion," the report said.
