IRAQI police have seized 30 men linked to terror groups and involved in three beheadings, the rape and murder of three women, and the separate murders of 40 other people, General Adel Molan said today. Some of the men belonged to al-Qaeda and some to its sister group Ansar al-Islam and were caught in Baladruz, 60km north-east of Baghdad, the general said. He said police had divided the detainees into three groups: the first was wanted for beheading three people; and the second for the separate murders of 40 people, including some Diyala provincial council members and Iraqi security forces. The third group raped and then murdered three women, Gen Molan said.On the other side of the Iraqi divide, army General Mohsen Hazaa Bayram al-Bayati, a Turkman who was seriously wounded on Sunday in the northern city of Kirkuk, died of his wounds today, medical sources said. "He died of his wounds around 11am (7pm AEDT). They had cut out his kidney and he suffered complications in his digestive tract," said Khaled Abdel Wahad, a doctor at Kirkuk general hospital. The general was shot as he entered his home in the second such attack in less than a week. A Christian general working at the interior ministry was shot dead on March 16 in Kirkuk.
In more violence, an Iraqi truck driver died in a bomb blast near the town of Shurgat in Saddam Hussein's home province of Salahaddin, said police Lieutenant Colonel Fares Mehdi. The driver, Mohamed Sadun Zaidun, was in a convoy guarded by US and Iraqi forces, Lt Col Mehdi added. The corpses of five Iraqi soldiers were found in Kut, south-east of Baghdad, a defence ministry source said. In another attack today, Husam Hussein, the driver of an interior ministry official, was gunned down in the southern district of Doura as he went to work, security sources said.