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  • Jan 2nd, 2005
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Iraqi insurgents made a bloody start to 2005 killing 13 people, including a US soldier and a Lebanese contractor, with promised nation-wide elections less than a month away. Two of the dead were beheaded by their killers, and one of the attacks, the drive-by shooting of a provincial official, was claimed by an affiliate of al-Qaeda.

In a new year's message broadcast on state television, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi warned Iraqis that 2005 promised to be decisive for their country's future.

Provincial council leader Nawfal Abdel Hussein was killed along with his brother Fares outside his home in the restive town of Baquba, north of Baghdad, medics and witnesses said.

Police also discovered the body of another council member, veterinarian Ali Herdan, dumped on a roadside outside the town.

Militants loyal to al-Qaeda's Iraq commander Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed Hussein's killing in a statement posted on a website.

The group also posted what appeared to be video footage of the execution of five Iraqi national guardsmen in the insurgents' stronghold of Ramadi on Monday.

In the capital, police found two beheaded corpses in white bags dumped in the western Al-Khadra neighbourhood.

Identity papers showed one of the men was employed by the US-led coalition, the interior ministry said.

In southeastern Baghdad, gunmen killed an Iraqi policeman outside his home, the ministry added.

And in the centre, a Lebanese employee of a Kuwaiti contracting firm was killed and a colleague wounded inside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified city centre compound which houses the Iraqi interim government and the US embassy.

North of the capital, two national guardsmen were killed and six wounded in a mortar strike on their base in Isaki, 20 kilometres south of the city of Samarra, a fellow officer told AFP.

Near the oil refinery town of Baiji, one Iraqi civilian was killed and four wounded, including a woman and a child, when insurgents and national guardsmen traded fire before dawn in the village of Al-Sainiya, police said.

Near the northern oil centre of Kirkuk, gunmen killed a police lieutenant outside his house in Taza, police said.

Further south, police recovered the corpses of two Iraqi truck drivers from by the banks of the Tigris River in Balad. The pair worked for a trucking firm doing business with the US military, police said.

Just north of Baghdad, one US soldier was killed and another wounded in a roadside bombing on Saturday, the US military said.

West of the capital, a US marine was killed in action in Al-Anbar province late Friday, the military said without specifying where.

That death brought US losses for the second half of 2004 to 504, the biggest six-month toll since the March 2003 invasion. Losses to date now stand at 1,326, based on a Pentagon tally.

Just south of the capital, an explosion cut a feeder pipeline to a power station in the insurgent bastion of Mussayeb, police said.

It was not immediately clear if the apparent sabotage attack had halted generation at the plant, which supplies electricity to Baghdad.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2005


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