Bombs and mortars kill 30 in post-ballot Iraq's bloodiest day

The deadliest attack came in Baquba, where a car bomb exploded outside the gates of a provincial police headquarters, killing 15 people and wounding 17.

Many victims were there to seek jobs as policemen, said police colonel Mudhahar al-Jubouri.

In 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.

The bomb went off outside the building, hospital director Tahseen Ali Mahmoud al-Obeidi said. Witnesses said the bomber called police officers over to him and then blew up among the crowd.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for both attacks, the latest attempt to under- mine the fledgling security forces struggling to control the country.

Insurgents also shelled a police station in Mosul with more than a dozen mortar rounds, killing three civilians, a police official said.

Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, has seen daily insurgent attacks and rebel clashes with United States troops and Iraqi security forces.

The attacks were the latest sign that insurgents are stepping up strikes against Iraq’s security forces, which the US hopes can assume a greater role in fighting the rebels once a newly-elected government takes office.

Meanwhile, the Swedish foreign ministry said yesterday that it was investigating reports that one of its citizens of Iraqi origin was kidnapped last month.

Aasa Arvidson, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, confirmed that a Swedish citizen in his sixties had been reported missing in Iraq and that Sweden’s embassy in Amman, Jordan, was investigating the case.

The missing man was identified by newspapers as Minas Ibrahim al-Yousifi, the purported leader of the Christian Democratic Party in Iraq. The Swedish foreign ministry refused to confirm the man’s identity.

On 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.

The violence and kidnappings raise new concerns about security following a brief downturn after the 30 January elections, when Iraqis voted for a new National Assembly in the first nationwide balloting since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.

A final tally is 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 per cent of Iraq’s 26 million people.

However, many Sunni Arabs, estimated at 20 per cent of the population and the core of the insurgency, are believed to have stayed at home, either out of fear of rebel reprisal or because of a boycott call by Sunni clerics.

In the Mosul area, 15,188 people were unable to vote because of irregularities, Iraqi election commission officials said yesterday. Gunmen looted some polling places, stealing ballot papers, according to a commission official, Izzedine al-Mahmoudi.

Officials said only 93 of a planned 330 polling centres opened in surrounding Ninevah province.

They also said first returns showed that Sunnis stayed away from the polls in Salahediin province, a mostly Sunni area that includes Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.

With results in from 80 per cent of the province’s polling stations, the largely Shiite United Iraqi Alliance - which is backed by the country’s senior Shiite clerics - had the most votes, with 27,645.

The Kurdish Alliance was next with 18,791 votes. A party headed by Iraq’s Sunni president, Ghazi al-Yawer, had received 15,832 votes while the faction led by interim prime Minister Ayad Allawi had just over 13,000 votes.