Baghdad, Iraq – At least 34 people were killed Saturday in a series of attacks across Iraq, and police found the bodies of 22 Iraqis who apparently had been kidnapped and tortured by death squads that plague the capital and other areas.
A suicide car bombing at a police station killed at least five people and wounded 10 in the Anbar city of Qaim.
In the day’s deadliest assault, 19 people died when a bomb hidden in a paper bag exploded in Baghdad’s Sadr City district next to a line of day laborers waiting for work.
Sadr City is the stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a foe of the U.S. presence who operates a powerful militia outside government control.
Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki hopes to absorb such militias into the Iraqi army and police as a way of reducing violence.
Elsewhere, a suicide bomber killed three civilians in Mosul, gunmen killed an Iraqi military officer, his wife and son in Baqouba, a mortar shell exploded at a Sunni mosque and killed two people in Baghdad, and two blacksmiths were shot to death in central Baghdad.
