Gunmen stormed into a new Sunni television station in Baghdad Thursday and killed 11 people including technicians, two guards and the head of the station's board of directors, police said. At least 10 other people died in attacks around Iraq, and authorities found the mutilated bodies of more likely victims of the sectarian death squads that roam the capital.
The raid on the southeastern Baghdad offices of Iraq's Shaabiya satellite station came at around 7 a.m., police Maj. Mahir Hamad said. An unknown number of gunmen pulled up at the station in seven cars, entered the offices and opened fire, then fled, station executive director Hassan Kamil told Associated Press Television News.
The station moved into the building in July and has not yet gone on the air, Kamil added.
In eastern Baghdad Thursday, four people died and eight injured when a suicide bomber on a motorcycle ran into a police patrol, police Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said. Two policemen were among the dead.
Elsewhere in the city, a synchronized bomb attack killed five and injured 11 others, police Lt. Bilal Ali Majid said.
A bomb in a car parked in central Baghdad's Qurtaba Square went off, followed shortly afterward by the detonation of second device planted on the roadside nearby, Majid said. One policeman was among the dead.
In another attack, a bomb exploded at 7 a.m. near a Shiite mosque in the Qahira neighborhood of northeastern Baghdad. Two minutes later, another bomb exploded, wounding four people who had gathered after the initial explosion, police 1st Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said.
In Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, a bomb attack in a residential district killed a woman and wounded six other people, police Capt. Laith Mohammed said. In Suwayrah, 25 miles downriver from Baghdad, authorities fished four bodies out of the Tigris that showed signs of torture.
