14 dead in Iraq funeral bombing
A triple bombing struck the funeral of the son of an anti-al-Qaeda tribal leader north-east of Baghdad on Sunday, one of several attacks across the country that left 14 people dead, Iraqi officials said.
The blasts hit a gathering of mourners in Wajihiya, some 45 miles from the capital, killing 11 and wounding 45.
The funeral was for a local Sunni tribal sheik’s son who died a day earlier.
Police said the father was a member of Sahwa, which had joined forces with US troops at the height of the Iraq war to fight al-Qaida.
Iraqi troops and Sahwa fighters have been a favourite target for Sunni insurgents, who consider them to be traitors. It was not clear how the son died.
Two policemen were killed and three others were wounded when a roadside bomb hit their patrol in Baghdad’s western suburbs of Abu Ghraib, said police and hospital officials.
In Fallujah, police said, gunmen shot dead Sunni cleric Khalid al-Jumeili, an organiser of the western city’s Sunni protest camp, in a drive-by shooting.
Sunni protest camps sprang up across the country this spring to protest what the group considers to be second-class-citizen treatment by the Shiite-led government.
A crackdown on one such camp in the north in April set off the current wave of violence, in which more than 5,500 people have been killed according to the UN.
Medics at nearby hospitals confirmed the casualty figures for all attacks.
