Insurgents bomb teaching hospital

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Insurgents struck at Iraqi police with a suicide bomb, a car bomb and mortars in the cities of Mosul and Baqouba Monday, killing at least 30 people as they pressed their campaign to undermine the fledgling security forces.\nThe deadliest attack came in Baqouba, where a car bomb exploded outside the gates of a provincial police headquarters, killing 15 people and wounding 17, police Col. Mudhahar al-Jubouri said. Many victims were there to seek jobs as policemen, al-Jubouri said.\nIn the northern city of Mosul, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside the compound of Jumhouri Teaching Hospital, killing 12 policemen guarding the site and injuring four others, hospital officials said.\nThe bomb went off outside the hospital building, hospital Director Tahseen Ali Mahmoud al-Obeidi said. Witnesses said the bomber called the police officers over to him and then blew up among the crowd.\n"I heard an explosion. When I went to check, I saw bodies everywhere," al-Obeidi said.\nThe ground was soaked with blood. Nurses collected body parts, putting them in bags.\nIn a posting on a Web site, the al-Qaida group in Iraq, led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said "a lion from the Martyrs Brigade" wearing an explosives belt managed to get inside a police post at the Mosul hospital. The claim could not be verified.\nThere was no claim for the Baqouba attack.\nAlso Monday, insurgents shelled a police station in Mosul with more than a dozen mortar rounds, killing three civilians, a police official said.\nThe violence and kidnappings raise new concerns about security after a brief downturn in violence after the Jan. 30 elections, when Iraqis chose a new National Assembly in the first nationwide balloting since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.\nA final tally was expected by Thursday, but initial returns point to a landslide by Shiite Muslim candidates endorsed by their clerics. Shiites are believed to comprise about 60 percent of Iraq's 26 million people.\nMany Sunni Arabs are believed to have stayed home, either out of fear of rebel reprisal or because of a boycott call by Sunni clerics.\nIn the Mosul area, 15,188 were unable to vote because of irregularities, Iraqi election commission officials said Monday. Gunmen looted some polling places, stealing ballot papers, commission official Izzedine al-Mahmoudi said.\nOfficials also said first returns showed that Sunnis stayed away from the polls in Salahediin province, a mostly Sunni area north of Baghdad that contains Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit.\nWith results in from 80 percent of the province's polling stations, the largely Shiite United Iraqi Alliance had the most votes with 27,645.\nThe Kurdish Alliance was next with 18,791 votes.\nA party headed by Iraq's Sunni president, Ghazi al-Yawer, received only 15,832 votes.\nThe faction led by pro-U.S. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi had just over 13,000 votes.\nOn Sunday, four Egyptian technicians were seized near the Mansour district of western Baghdad, Egyptian and Iraqi officials said. They worked for Iraqna, a subsidiary of the Egyptian firm Orascom Telecommunications, which operates the mobile phone network in Baghdad and central Iraq.\nSix other Egyptians working for Iraqna were kidnapped in two separate incidents in September. All were ultimately freed, although Orascom said at the time it was committed to continuing its work in Iraq. No group claimed responsibility for the latest abduction.\nAlso on Sunday, the U.S. command denied a report by an Iraqi police captain that 22 Iraqi security troops and 14 insurgents were killed Sunday night when rebels tried to storm a police station in a village south of Baghdad.\nIn a telephone interview with The Associated Press Sunday, Capt. Muthana Khalid Ali of the Babil provincial police command had said the attack in Al-Bu Mustafa village, in the Mahawil district, about 50 miles south of Baghdad. He said the fighting raged for about an hour and five Iraqi national guardsmen and 17 police were killed, as well as 14 insurgents.\nU.S. command spokeswoman Capt. Patricia Brewer said no attack occurred, citing provincial authorities. Capt. Ali later said he had misread the initial report.