Insurgents set off bomb, attack police stations, kill soldier

BAGHDAD - A car bomb outside an American base killed nine people Sunday and injured 30, including three U.S. soldiers, and insurgents blasted Iraqi police stations in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad and in a town south of the capital. A U.S. soldier was killed in a mortar attack.

One of the police stations - in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood - was blown up Sunday after insurgents raked the building with gunfire, ordered Iraqi police to leave, planted explosives and detonated them. Two explosions were heard late Sunday in central Baghdad, but the location and cause could not be determined.

Meanwhile, a U.S. security company confirmed Sunday that four of its employees - two Americans and two Poles - were killed the day before in an ambush on the main road to Baghdad airport. The company, Blackwater USA, lost four employees in an ambush last March in Fallujah that triggered the bloody three-week siege of the restive Sunni Muslim city.

In London, the British Foreign Office reported Sunday that a British security contractor was killed and three colleagues were wounded in a drive-by shooting Saturday in the northern city of Mosul. The four worked for ArmorGroup, a security firm with 1,000 employees in Iraq protecting official buildings and companies.

The car-bombing occurred at the gate of the Taji air base, a former Iraqi air force facility used by the U.S. Army about 12 miles north of Baghdad. It was unclear if the explosion was a suicide attack. Ambulances, Humvees and Iraqi police rushed to evacuate the injured, while American troops secured the area.

Meanwhile, the U.S. command reported that an American soldier was killed Sunday morning and another wounded in a mortar attack on the 13th Corps Support Command base near Balad north of Baghdad.

Later Sunday, gunmen attacked the Karama police station in Sadr City, the scene of clashes between the Americans and gunmen loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The assailants ordered police to file out of the blue-painted single story building, rigged it with explosives and detonated the charges, engulfing the building in a cloud of smoke.

In a similar attack, eight people disguised as police entered a police station late Saturday in Musayyib, about 45 miles south of Baghdad, and shot dead seven officers before blowing up the building.

Also Sunday, a vehicle carrying a crew from the Arabic-language satellite television broadcaster Al-Jazeera was attacked by five gunmen near Iskandariyah south of Baghdad, the station said. The team managed to escape unharmed after a 20-minute chase.

Late Sunday, a roadside bomb exploded in Ramadi, a Sunni city west of Baghdad, killing two police officers and injuring six, said police Capt. Zyad al-Juburi.

Despite the continuing violence, the Army released 320 detainees Sunday from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, the center of the scandal involving abuse of inmates by American soldiers. It was the fourth major release since the scandal broke in April.

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