Iraq bombings kill seven

Seven people were killed in attacks in central and northern Iraq on Monday, including five who died in a spate of bombings in the former insurgent bastion of Fallujah, officials said. In Fallujah, just west of Baghdad, three bomb attacks in close succession killed five people and wounded 18 others. An initial car bomb blew up in the centre of the city, killing five people and wounding eight, Anbar provincial police spokesman First Lieutenant Ali al-Amiri and doctor Omar Dalli from Fallujah hospital said. Two more attacks, a motorcycle bomb and a roadside bomb, in the east and west of the city, respectively, wounded 10 more people, including two traffic policemen, the officials said. Explosives experts defused another car bomb and two roadside bombs. Fallujah, in the western Sunni Arab province of Anbar, was one of several towns along the Euphrates valley that became Al-Qaeda strongholds after the 2003 US-led invasion. However, from 2006, local Sunni tribes sided with the US military and unrest dwindled in Anbar as rebel fighters were ejected from the region. In Baghdad, a bomb near a cafe at around 9:00 pm (1800 GMT) in the southeast of the city killed one person and wounded 30 others, a security official and a medic said. Another attack on Monday in the disputed northern city of Kirkuk left intelligence service First Lieutenant Abbas Fatih Ahmed dead when a magnetic "sticky bomb" attached to his car detonated shortly after he left his house, deputy provincial police chief Major General Torhan Abdulrahman said. Violence across Iraq is down from its peaks in 2006 and 2007, but attacks remain common. A total of 126 Iraqis were killed in April, according to official figures.