Police and medical workers said at least 20 Iraqis died in clashes Tuesday in Ramadi, where American occupation forces and warplanes have conducted a series of operations over recent days.
Also Tuesday, gunmen wearing Interior Ministry commando uniforms kidnapped up to 150 staff members from a government research institute in downtown Baghdad, the head of the parliamentary education committee said, according to the AP. Alaa Makki said reports had been received that between 100 and 150 people, both Shiites and Sunnis, had been abducted in the raid at about 9:30 a.m.
Police and witnesses said gunmen closed off roads around the institute in the downtown Karradah district at about 9:30 a.m., and loaded their handcuffed captives onto pickup trucks before driving away to an unknown destination.
Meanwhile, Ali al-Obaidi, a medic at Ramadi Hospital, said those killed were civilians who died in shelling by U.S. tanks. A police spokesman said 20 people died.
In other violence, assailants killed seven passengers aboard a minivan ambushed Tuesday near Mandali on the Iranian border, Diyala provincial police said. Six people were killed in fighting overnight between Shiite gunmen and American forces in Shula, northwest Baghdad, police spokesman Mohammed Kheyoun said.
Elsewhere in the capital, one person was killed when a car bomb detonated near a restaurant in west Baghdad, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said.
