Gunmen kill intelligence officer in Baghdad as troops and insurgents clash(AFP)16 February 2005
BAGHDAD - Gunmen shot dead an Interior Ministry intelligence officer in a southern Baghdad neighborhood on Wednesday, and US troops clashed with insurgents west of the Iraqi capital, police and witnesses said.
Attackers opened fire on 1st Lt. Ghazi Hoshi as he was getting into his car to go to work in Baghdad’s volatile Dora district, said Falah Mohamadawi, a police detective.
In Ramadi, 110 kilometers (70 miles) west of the capital, insurgents fired more than 25 mortar rounds at US and Iraqi positions, including a group of American troops hunkered in an abandoned glass factory, witnesses said.
The attack sparked clashes in several parts of the city afterward, and American troops sealed off a southeastern district of Ramadi, said resident Hussein Molseh.
There was no word on casualties and US military officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
Elsewhere, gunmen seriously wounded a police colonel and killed his driver in the northern city of Mosul, said Sayed Hussein, a medic at a Mosul hospital where the casualties were brought. The colonel’s bodyguard was also wounded in the attack, he said.
In other violence Tuesday, a US soldier assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in action in western Iraq, the US military said in a statement from Fallujah on Wednesday. The military gave no other details of the death.
Also Tuesday, assailants killed Jassim Mohammed Mousa al-Daraji, a former municipal official and ex-Baath Party member in the eastern Baghdad slum of Sadr City, residents said Wednesday as they gathered for his funeral.
In western Baghdad, unidentified attackers killed a civil aviation official and shot dead a police sergeant as he was driving through the east of the city, police said.
Kidnappings, assassinations and bombings have become frequent in insurgency-plagued Iraq since the United States led the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.