Three members of the same family and two other people were killed in violence in the capital and northern Iraq on Sunday, including a string of Baghdad rocket attacks, a security official said.
In the deadliest incident, gunmen wearing police uniforms stormed a family home in the Bayaa district of southwest Baghdad and killed three people, an interior ministry official said, without giving a motive.
He said another person was killed and 12 wounded in nine rocket attacks across Baghdad, including five fired into the heavily-fortified Green Zone that is home to the US embassy and parliament.
Baghdad operations command, which is responsible for security in the capital, said security forces had seized a rocket launcher in Al-Nahdha district, close to the interior ministry.
Eleven rockets were also seized, it said, without any arrests made.
A roadside bomb near the National Theatre in central Baghdad, meanwhile, wounded three people, the security official added.
And in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, a sticky bomb affixed to a car carrying three tax agency officials exploded, killing one of them and wounding the two others, a police officer in the city said.
Violence in Iraq is down from its peak in 2006 and 2007 but attacks remain common, especially in Baghdad. A total of 211 people died as a result of attacks in April, according to official figures.
earlier related report
'Old cluster bomb' kills three Iraqi children
Diwaniyah, Iraq (AFP) May 15, 2011 –
Three young boys were killed and another was badly wounded on Sunday when an unexploded cluster bomb detonated in south Iraq, medical and security officials said.
The children, who officials estimated were aged between six and 12, were playing in a garden in the village of Al-Attah, just east of the southern city of Diwaniyah, when the bomb exploded at about 2:00 pm (1100 GMT).
"Diwaniyah hospital received the bodies of three children killed by an old cluster bomb, and one other was seriously wounded," said Ahmed al-Bideri, spokesman for the provincial health department.
A police official, who declined to be named, confirmed the toll and also attributed the explosion to a cluster bomb.
Iraq last year asked for international help to clear an estimated 20 million unexploded land mines and ordnance that are a legacy of the 1980-1988 war with Iran, the 1990 assault on Kuwait and the 2003 US-led invasion.
A United Nations official said last year that Iraq was one of the most affected countries in the world when it came to land mines and unexploded ordnance.
Since 1991, an estimated 8,000 Iraqis, among them 2,000 children, have been killed or maimed by mines and cluster bombs, according to United Nations figures.
US forces passed through Al-Attah during the 2003 invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein, and it was also one of the sites of a Shiite uprising against Saddam's regime in 1991 that was ruthlessly suppressed by the ex-dictator.
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