Baghdad, Dec 1 (IANS) At least 17 people were killed and more than 35 others injured Thursday in a deadly car bombing and shooting in Iraq, police said.
A car bomb exploded at a crowded vegetable market in Khalis near Baquba, the provincial capital of Diyala, some 65 km from Baghdad, killing nine people and wounding 30 others, a police official told Xinhua. Several shops and cars were damaged.
In the other attack, gunmen broke into the houses of two brothers, one of them a member of a local anti-insurgent group, in the al-Jeel, 20 km from Baquba, killing eight people and wounding four others, the official said.
The attackers later planted a bomb on the road leading to the two houses and detonated it when a police force arrived at the scene of the first attack. Two policemen were wounded, he said.
Diyala province, which stretches from the eastern edges of Baghdad to the Iranian border east of the country, has long been a stronghold of Al Qaeda militants.
