2 police officers killed in Al Anbar car bombing

Insurgents took aim again Tuesday at Sunni Arabs who have joined forces with U.S. troops against Al Qaeda, setting off a car bomb in Al Anbar province that killed at least two policemen, officials said in Ramadi, the provincial capital.

A group linked to Al Qaeda claimed to be holding 14 Iraqi police officers and soldiers to avenge Shiite attacks on Sunnis, and it threatened to kill them within 72 hours. The claim appeared on a video posted on an Internet site by the Islamic State of Iraq, which showed 14 men in Iraqi police and military uniforms.

However, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, which oversees police forces, denied that any officers had been abducted and said the men in the video were neither police nor soldiers, common targets of the Sunni insurgency.

The Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization comprising several pro-Al Qaeda groups, also has claimed involvement in the abduction of three U.S. soldiers last month south of Baghdad. One of the soldiers was found dead, and an Islamic State of Iraq video, which surfaced June 4, claimed the other two were dead and showed identification cards and other items the group said it had seized from the missing men. The claim has not been verified.

In its latest statement, the group said it had seized Iraqi forces to demand the release of Sunni women held in Iraqi prisons, and the arrest of people “who participated in the rape” of Sunni women and “all the members who killed, displaced and raped our families in Tall Afar.”

Dozens of Sunnis died in the northern city of Tall Afar when Shiite Muslim gunmen, including police officers, went on a rampage after a bombing March 27 that killed at least 83 Shiites. In February, two Sunni women, one in Tall Afar and one in Baghdad, accused Shiite police officers of raping them in separate incidents. The Shiite-led government and security forces accused the women of lying, inflaming Sunni-Shiite tensions.

Security forces are frequent targets of insurgents seeking to topple the U.S.-backed Shiite-dominated government and drive foreign troops from Iraq.

Earlier Tuesday, an Iraqi police officer died in an attack in a Sunni-dominated area northwest of Baghdad. Four other policemen were wounded when a bomb exploded on the road between the northern city of Kirkuk and Zab, about 25 miles to the west.

In Ramadi, the car bomb that killed two police officers in a western neighborhood also wounded at least four people.

In recent months, Sunni tribal sheiks in Al Anbar who once harbored Al Qaeda fighters have provided thousands of police recruits and agreed to cooperate with U.S. forces to drive out insurgents. The militants in turn have stepped up attacks on police forces in the province.

In Diyala province, another hotbed of insurgent activity, police said a truck bomb blew up near an Iraqi military base 15 miles southwest of the capital, Baqubah, killing at least two people and injuring six. It was not clear whether the victims were civilians or soldiers.

Mohammed Abdul-Wahab, who drives a water tanker, said he was trying to get to a spring near the military base but was held back by soldiers as they inspected a suspicious truck parked nearby. The truck suddenly exploded in a huge fireball, he said.

In Baghdad, 32 people were reported killed in various attacks, including 26 men whose bodies were found around the city, apparent victims of sectarian death squads.

In a sign of the ghoulish methods being used by insurgents to wreak havoc, two people were injured when a corpse exploded as they sought to retrieve it from a street in the Baghdad neighborhood of Mansour. Later, two other corpses exploded as police dragged them by ropes after being warned not to pick up the bodies.

U.S. forces announced the seizure of a major weapons cache that included hundreds of boxes of toilet bowl cleaner, apparently intended to make chemical weapons. The raid Sunday in west Baghdad also led to the arrest of a suspected pro-Al Qaeda operative, Army Lt. Kevin Mills said.

“We’ve been looking for this guy for some time,” said Mills, who did not identify the captive.

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tina.susman@latimes.com

Times staff writer Saif Hameed and special correspondents in Baqubah, Ramadi and Baghdad contributed to this report.