BAGHDAD, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- Nine people were killed and seven wounded in separate bomb and gunfire attacks, mainly targeting security members, in central and northern Iraq on Wednesday, the police said.
In Iraq's northern city of Mosul, some 400 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, two off-duty policemen were shot dead by gunmen at a marketplace in the city's northern district of al- Hadbaa, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
Separately, gunmen stopped a bus carrying passengers in western Mosul and shot dead a young man aboard, but a police force arrived and exchanged fire with the attackers who killed one of the policemen before they fled the scene, the source said.
In central Iraq, two roadside bombs struck a car carrying three soldiers in Abu Ghraib area, some 20 km west of Baghdad, killing two soldiers and wounding the third, a local police source anonymously told Xinhua.
In a separate incident, another roadside bomb explosion near a police patrol in Abu Ghraib killed a policeman and wounded two others, the source said.
Also in the area, a roadside bomb went off near a civilian car wounding four people aboard, two of whom were off-duty soldiers, the source added.
Insurgent attacks continue in the once volatile Sunni Arab area in west of Baghdad that stretches through Anbar province to Iraq's western borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, gunmen using silenced pistols shot dead an intelligence service officer while driving his car in the town of Mahmoudiyah, some 30 km south of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry source anonymously told Xinhua.
In Iraq's Salahudin province north of Baghdad, Sabah Bahaa al- Din, a professor at the college of agriculture, was killed when a sticky bomb attached to his car detonated as he was parking outside the college in northern the provincial capital city of Tirkit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, a provincial police source said on condition of anonymity.
Violence in Iraq has ebbed from its climax in 2006 and 2007, when sectarian conflicts pushed the country to the brink of a civil war, but tensions and sporadic shootings and bombings are still common across the country.
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