Iraq: Anti-government guerrillas yesterday detonated bombs at a Baghdad restaurant and a Shia mosque, part of a series of attacks that killed up to 50 people and wounded 130.
A car bomb exploded at lunchtime outside a northern Baghdad restaurant, killing eight people and wounding around 90, police and hospital officials said.
Later, a suicide car bomber targeted a Shia mosque in Mahmoudiya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, killing seven people and wounding 23, many of them children, doctors said.
Last night up to 30 people were feared dead or wounded after two car bombs exploded outside a building housing a Shia organisation in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar.
The attack appeared to target a Turkman-Shia sheikh, Hasan Bagdash, police sources said. It was the second failed assassination attempt on Bagdash in recent days.
The attack in mixed Sunni and Shia Mahmoudiya comes amid a surge in sectarian violence over the past three weeks, since the formation of a Shia-led government, Iraq's first.
The rise in sectarianism, which has seen hundreds of tit-for-tat killings, has raised fears that Iraq could slide towards civil war.
The al-Qaeda organisation in Iraq, led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which has claimed responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks in the country, earlier said it was behind the assassination of a government official and his driver as they were heading for work in Baghdad.
The morning assassination of Wael Rubaie, an official in the operations room of the ministry of state for national security, was the latest in a long line of targeted killings and it came on another bloody day for the country.
In Tuz Khurmatu, south of the oil city of Kirkuk, a suicide truck bomb exploded outside the mayor's office, killing five and wounding 18, local police said.
Guerrillas also struck in Samarra, targeting a US base with two suicide car bombs and a suicide bomber strapped with explosives. Four Iraqis were killed and four US soldiers were among the wounded.
Mostly Sunni Arab insurgents have stepped up a campaign of violence that has killed more than 500 people since the new government was formed amid the promise of greater stability.
US and Iraqi forces detained 285 suspected insurgents in the western Baghdad district of Abu Ghraib after a major operation designed to kill or capture guerrillas in the capital, the US military said.
Zarqawi's group said on Sunday it killed a man it accused of being a US pilot, and posted pictures of his identity papers on the internet, naming him as Neenus Khoshaba.
The man's brother, Boulus, said Mr Khoshaba had never worked for the US military and had recently returned to Iraq seeking business opportunities after studying in the United States. Mr Khoshaba was last seen just before heading to a meeting with oil officials.
"All we know is he has been kidnapped," Boulus said. "Today we heard from satellite channels that Zarqawi killed him." Insurgents have kidnapped over 150 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis over the past two years. Many were released but about a third were killed, some by beheading.