Gunmen killed one Russian embassy employee and kidnapped four others in Baghdad yesterday, Russian and Iraqi officials said, in the latest attack on foreigners in the lawless capital.
A car bomb in the southern city of Basra killed at least 15 people and wounded 30, police said, three days after new Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced a security crackdown there.
The violence was yet another reminder of the challenges that Maliki, a tough-talking Shi'ite Islamist, faces in delivering on his pledge to restore stability in Iraq.
Key to that will be the naming of non-sectarian interior and defence ministers who can quell communal and insurgent violence, after the two jobs remained empty due to wrangling when Maliki's government took office two weeks ago.
Government sources said leaders were close to a deal to present to parliament on Sunday former Shi'ite army officer Farouk al-Araji for Interior Minister and a Sunni army commander, General Abdel Qader Jassim, for Defence Minister.
They will have to deal with violence such as the bomb which exploded yesterday near a market in Basra, where Maliki imposed a one-month state of emergency to tackle criminal gangs and Shi'ite factions whose feuding threatens crucial oil exports.
It was one of the worst such attacks in Iraq's second city since the 2003 US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.
The oil region patrolled by British forces has been relatively calm compared to insurgent strongholds further north where American forces are based. But security in Basra has deteriorated over the past year as rival groups within Iraq's Shi'ite majority compete for power.
Diplomats and other foreigners in Iraq have often been targeted in kidnappings and killings in the last three years. In Moscow, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said the victims in Baghdad were all Russian nationals working at the embassy, but he could not say whether any of them was a diplomat.
Iraqi Interior Ministry sources said gunmen in three cars blocked a road in the well-to-do Mansour district and opened fire on the embassy vehicle. A police source and a nearby resident said the victims had been buying food.
Reuters Television footage showed a white sports utility vehicle with a smashed window, its trunk filled with vegetables and other foodstuffs. Blood on the pavement suggested someone had been shot outside the car, but this could not be confirmed.
Militants kidnapped United Arab Emirates diplomat Naji al-Noaimi in Baghdad last month. He was freed after two weeks.
Last year, Al-Qaeda killed two Algerian diplomats and an Egyptian diplomat. In August 2003, a truck bomb outside UN headquarters in Baghdad killed 22, including top UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian.
Diplomats or embassy workers from Japan, Iran, Germany and the United States have also been killed in the past three years. More than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped in the same period. Some were beheaded or shot.
The kidnappers are usually politically motivated Islamic militants or criminal gangs seeking a ransom.
North of Baghdad, gunmen killed six Iraqi policemen yesterday in an attack on a checkpoint in the town of Baquba, in a religiously mixed and volatile area. In a discovery gruesome even by Iraqi standards, police also said they said they found the severed heads of seven cousins and an imam by the side of the road near Baquba.
Notes left with the heads and read by ambulance workers identified one as Sheikh Abdel Aziz al-Mashhadani, the imam of a Sunni Arab mosque near Baghdad. The note accused him of killing four Shi'ite physicians.
Just two weeks after Maliki took office, relations between his government and the United States appear to have been soured by accusations of US troops killing Iraqi civilians.
Iraq vowed yesterday to press on with its own probe into the deaths of civilians in a US raid on the town of Ishaqi in March, rejecting the US military's exoneration of its forces.
Adnan al-Kazimi, an aide to the prime minister, said the government would also demand an apology from the United States and compensation for the victims in several cases, including a suspected massacre in the town of Haditha last year.