Bombings, Shootings Kill at Least 30 in Iraq

BAGHDAD, May 8 -- Bombings and shootings killed more than 30 people in Iraq on Monday, including at least a dozen men apparently taken to Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad and killed execution-style.

Much of the violence was sectarian in nature. Attacks included Sunni insurgent strikes on targets of the Shiite-led government and U.S. forces, and killings by what appeared to be sectarian death squads.

Also on Monday, a roadside bomb killed an American soldier southeast of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. The military reported that another American soldier was killed in fighting Sunday near the northern city of Tall Afar.

In central Baghdad, a car bomb exploded near a courthouse, killing five Iraqi civilians, police told news agencies. Another bomb, planted in a car in the mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood of Palestine Street, targeted a patrol of Iraq's heavily Shiite police force, police Gen. Abdulrahman al-Dulaimi said. The blast killed a passerby.

Gunmen in the capital ambushed a bus carrying employees of the Ministry of Higher Education to work, killing two men on the bus and wounding eight other passengers, Dulaimi said. The body of one man lay in the door of the bus, and another just outside, as women wept and rush-hour drivers peeled around the scene.

An Iraqi reporter and an Iraqi technician working for Egyptian-owned al-Nahrain TV were found shot dead southeast of Baghdad. Station authorities said men dressed in police uniforms, with police cars and standard-issue police weapons, had stopped reporter Laith al-Dulaimi and technician Muazaz Ahmed at a police checkpoint south of Baghdad on Sunday and took the journalists away.

"We called upon and pleaded" with Iraqi authorities, said Abdul Karim al-Mahdawee, general director of al-Nahrain. "They all said that they do not have them, and this has become a known thing meaning that they were executed."

Summary killings have been blamed on police forces of the Shiite-run Interior Ministry. The ministry has denied the charges.

At least 70 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. About three-fourths of them have been Iraqis.

The bodies of three Interior Ministry police commandoes were found in Babil province south of Baghdad, said Capt. Muthanna Ahmed, a provincial police spokesman. The men had been kidnapped months ago, Ahmed said.

Other killings included those of the dozen men found stiffened and bloodied on the curbs in two Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad, Amiriyah and Adhamiyah. Police said eight bodies in Adhamiyah were those of Shiite laborers; there was no immediate word on the identities of the other four.

Victims found dead in Sunni neighborhoods often have been brought there, pushed from cars and shot, Sunni leaders say. The identity of the killers is often murky, although Shiite militias and police as well as Sunni insurgents are blamed. The bodies of men -- shot, often bound and often tortured -- are found in Baghdad each day.

Special correspondents Saad al-Izzi in Baghdad, Saad Sarhan in Najaf and other Washington Post staff members contributed to this report.