Attack on governor’s compound in Iraq kills at least 27

At least 27 people, many of them police, were killed and more than 30 wounded Tuesday when a pair of bombs exploded by the house of the provincial governor in the central Iraqi city of Diwaniyah, according to police and medical sources.

It is not known if the governor, Salam Hussein Alwan, or his family had been injured, according to police. The double blast ripped the area around the governor’s compound in the capital of the normally quiet southern province, Qadissiyah. There are conflicting reports from police on whether two car bombs exploded or just one car bomb followed by a suicide bomber on foot, who entered the governor’s compound.

The attack follows an assault last week by an insurgent group on the main local government building in the Diyala province in eastern Iraq, and a deadly assault in March on the seat of the northern Salahuddin province’s governing body.

The explosion in Diwaniyah followed the bombing of a French embassy convoy in Baghdad on Monday, wounding several Iraqis, and a blast Sunday targeting a western security company guarding a client in the southern oil region of Basra. That attack, on a route traveled by oil companies and western firms, left one Iraqi and one Westerner wounded, according to Iraqi and western security sources.

Iraq’s officials held a meeting Monday to repair fractured relations among the political blocs and to begin discussions on whether U.S. troops should stay in Iraq after 2011. Despite forming a government last December, the cabinet has failed to name its security ministers, and the country’s politics remain corroded by mistrust.

(Staff writer Ned Parker contributed to this report)