IRAQ: A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of Iraqi army recruits yesterday, killing 21 people and injuring 27 more.
The attack was the deadliest yet in a renewed campaign of violence as insurgents seek to regain the initiative lost after last week's historic poll.
The bomber, who appeared to be on foot, struck as dozens of recruits queued outside an Iraqi National Guard headquarters in the centre of Baghdad, the US military said.
On Monday, a suicide bomber also wandered into a crowd of Iraqi policemen near a hospital in the northern city of Mosul, killing 12 officers.
The attacks by bombers on foot point to a shift in tactics, as blast walls and roadblocks have made it harder to strike at Iraqi security forces with car bombs.
Iraqi officials had hoped successful elections might quell the insurgency.
However, a low turnout in Sunni areas of the country, where the insurgency is strongest, suggested the militants' grip is as strong as ever.
Elsewhere in Baghdad, insurgents clashed with police officers, killing three, and sprayed a politician's car with gunfire, killing two of the man's sons.
The politician, Mithal al-Alusi, who achieved notoriety last year by calling for ties with Israel, escaped the attack unhurt. The killing of the army recruits was condemned by the Iraqi interim government.
"To attack and brutally murder patriotic and innocent Iraqis on their way to volunteer to protect their homeland is a crime against all people of Iraq," said Thair al-Naqib, spokesman for interim Prime Minister Mr Iyad Allawi. "We will fully investigate this incident and bring these perpetrators to justice."
Iraq's security forces have borne the brunt of attacks by insurgents. The US military is trying to build them up into a force capable of defeating the militants but says it needs more time, particularly to get local police divisions up to scratch.
US officials say Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld will lobby NATO allies at a meeting in France this week to provide more money to help train Iraqis, and British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair said yesterday he expected an agreement on the issue at a NATO summit in Brussels on February 22nd.
Alliance nations agreed last June to establish a mission to train 1,000 Iraqi officers a year, but NATO has yet to raise enough staff for formal training to begin.
Meanwhile, the government also said it captured a relative of Saddam Hussein last month. Basher Mutar al-Tikriti is suspected of supporting and sheltering members of Saddam's regime, including Saddam's son Qusay, it said.
The government said a member of the Zarqawi network had also been caught in Baghdad last month.
The counting of votes from the January 30th polls continued. A Shia alliance is still in the lead, according to partial results.