Top official, 3 cops with 12 Al-Zarqawi men Killed in Iraq
Pakistan Times Wire Service

BAGHDAD (Iraq): A high-ranking government official was gunned down in Baghdad Tuesday, while three policemen were killed in attacks north of the capital, security sources said.

Ahmed Subeih Weiss, a senior official at the ministry of water resources,was shot dead by gunmen in the southern Baghdad district of Dura as he was going to work, an interior ministry official said.

In the restive Samarra, 125 kilometres (80 miles) north of Baghdad, three policemen were shot dead by insurgents in separate attacks, police said.

In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded near a police patrol in the western neighourhood of Gazaliya, wounding a policeman and a civilian.

Another three bombs went off in the capital, wounding three policemen.

Al-Zarqawi Men

Meanwhile, the US military said in Baghdad Tuesday that its troops killed 12 insurgents, whom it claimed were close to the wanted extremist Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, in a firefight and air strikes.

Nine of the insurgents heavily armed with assault rifles and hand grenades, were killed when forces from the US-led coalition stopped a suspect truck and then came under fire near the town of Al Qaim close to the Syrian border, the military said in a statement early Tuesday.

Two people -- one of them a suspected insurgent and the other a six-year-old child -- were wounded in the operation some 305 kilometers (190 miles) west of Baghdad, which occurred after the military had received a tip-off about suspect activity.

Three other suspected insurgents were killed in a subsequent air strike near the site, it said. Six soldiers from the coalition were wounded in the operation, the statement added.●