BAGHDAD — Gunmen on Saturday abducted and killed four employees of an Iraqi television station who were filming a program about the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, one of a series of attacks in Iraq that left at least 18 people dead.
A bomb concealed in a kiosk used to sell ice killed four security personnel and wounded nine people at a checkpoint in Baghdad, Iraqi officials said. Northeast of the capital, eight Kurdish soldiers died in a roadside bombing that reflected how ethnic tensions remain dangerously high.
Al-Sharqiya television said its employees were seized at noon in the northern city of Mosul as they filmed an episode for a program about Iftar, the evening meal at which Muslims break their sunrise-to-sunset fast during Ramadan, which began this month.
The dead included Mussab Mahmoud al-Azawi, head of the station’s office in Mosul, two cameramen and a driver.
An announcer on the station, which broadcasts to Iraq from Dubai by satellite, blamed the killings on “dark forces that are destabilizing the security in Iraq, silencing the voices of freedom and attacking the national independent media.”
Brig. Khalid Abdul-Sattar, the police spokesman in Ninevah province, said two suspects were being questioned after a pistol and an assault rifle were found in their car in the area of the slayings.
Al-Sharqiya is owned by a former chief of radio and TV for Saddam Hussein and has been accused of being sympathetic to the former Baathists who once ruled Iraq.
Also Saturday, gunmen stormed a house in eastern Mosul and killed a man and a woman, police and hospital officials said on condition of anonymity because of security concerns. A police officer said that the victims were Sunni Arabs and that the man was a taxi driver. Authorities did not speculate on the motive.
