Naseer Al-Nahr • Arab News

BAGHDAD, 14 June 2004 — A top Iraqi Education Ministry official was assassinated yesterday while a suicide attacker detonated a car bomb near a US military camp in Baghdad, killing at least 12 people and wounding 13.

Also yesterday, an American soldier was killed and two others were wounded during a bombing and small arms attack near Taji north of Baghdad and a rocket slammed into the heavily fortified Green Zone headquarters of the American-run occupation authority here. The rocket caused minor damage to the Republican Palace, where chief US administrator L. Paul Bremer has his headquarters.

The violence came a day after Iraq’s Deputy Foreign Minister Bassam Salih Qubba was killed in a drive-by shooting.

The US-led administration has said fighters may step up attacks before and after the occupation formally ends June 30 to disrupt the handover and discredit Iraq’s new government.

While the new bloodshed seemed to bear out that view, two foreign hostages, a Turk and an Egyptian, were freed after what a mediator called talks with men close to their captors.

Police at the scene of the car bombing said their colleagues had tried to stop a vehicle racing on the wrong side of the road toward an Iraqi military college in southeast Baghdad, where many US soldiers are also based.

Abdul Razzak Kadhem, a senior police officer, said two police cars had intercepted the vehicle, which then exploded.

The US military said the blast had killed eight Iraqi civilians and four police, and wounded 13 people.

The Iraqi civil servant, Kamal Al-Jarrah, 63, who headed the Education Ministry’s cultural relations department, was shot in his garden in the western Ghazaliya district of the capital.

He died in hospital, an Education Ministry official said. Jarrah’s wife, who was with him in the garden, was unhurt. Assassins also struck at Baghdad University, where they shot dead geography professor Sabri Al-Bayati as he walked on a road just outside the campus yesterday.

— Additional input from agencies