Three killed in Iraq's violence

Three people were killed in separate attacks in central and eastern Iraq on Saturday, the police said. An explosive expert was killed while trying to defuse a car bomb on a main road in the town of Ameriyat al-Fallujah, near the city of Fallujah, some 50 km west of Baghdad, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity. In a separate incident, gunmen with assault rifles opened fire on a shop owner in the same town, killing him and wounding his son, the source said. Insurgent attacks continue in the once volatile Sunni Arab area that stretches through Anbar province to Iraq's western borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In Iraq's eastern province of Diyala, gunmen shot dead a former Iraqi army officer under Saddam Hussein's regime at a village near the provincial capital city of Baquba, some 65 km northeast of Baghdad, a provincial police source anonymously told Xinhua. Diyala province, which stretches from the eastern edges of Baghdad to the Iranian border east of the country, has long been a stronghold for al-Qaida militants and other insurgent groups since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 despite repeated U.S. and Iraqi military operations against them. Violence in Iraq has decreased from its climax in 2006 and 2007, when sectarian conflicts pushed the country to the brink of a civil war, but tensions and sporadic shootings and bombings are still common across the country.