Attack Kills 17 Policemen In Town North of Baghdad

MUQDADIYAH, Iraq, March 21 -- Armed men overran a police station, a courthouse and the house of a provincial official in this town north of Baghdad just before dawn Tuesday, killing or wounding all the policemen inside the station, burning buildings and freeing jail inmates, local authorities said.

The raid killed 17 policeman and wounded seven, said Ali Khayam, a spokesman with a U.S.-Iraqi operations center in the province, Diyala. A bomb killed two more policemen as they rushed to the scene from the nearby city of Baqubah, the Reuters news agency reported.

At least one attacker also died in the raid, and a burned corpse was found inside the jail, Khayam said.

The raid came at 5:15 a.m. in Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles north of Baghdad. Attackers opened the attack with mortar rounds and then stormed the complex with Kalashnikov assault rifles, Khayam said.

The attack freed more than 20 prisoners, Khayam said. Authorities were checking jail records to determine exactly how many escaped.

One of the inmates inside at the time of the raid was the son of a Rasheed Taam, a Baathist official in the western city of Ramadi, Ali said. Ali said the father is a fugitive sought by both American and Iraqi authorities.

The early morning raid followed a day of bombings and killings that left at least 39 people dead across Iraq, according to authorities and news agencies.

At least 10 of Monday's victims were policemen, killed by bombs, drive-by shootings and in clashes in Baghdad and south of Baghdad, authorities said. Other victims included three civilians killed by a bomb left at a coffee shop, and four Shiite pilgrims in a minibus returning from an annual pilgrimage to the Shiite holy city of Karbala.