By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Gunmen killed two relatives of a senior Kurdish official and 14 others died in a string of bombings and shootings overnight and on Sunday, shattering three days of relative calm that followed the country's first election for a full-term parliament.
In the northern city of Kirkuk, two relatives of an official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main Kurdish parties, were shot late Saturday as they walked near their house, police said.
In Baghdad, a roadside bomb on Sunday killed three police officers and wounded two, while another left one policeman dead and two wounded in the northern town of Tuz, 110 kilometers south of Kirkuk, on Saturday night police said. Another roadside bomb killed at least one woman and injured 11 others in the northern Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, police said.
Unidentified gunmen in separate incidents killed a police Lt. Colonel and an Interior Ministry employee as they were driving to work in western Baghdad.
A police captain and his driver were shot and killed in south Baghdad while two people, including an Interior Ministry driver, were killed in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City slum.
A suicide bomber killed a police officer and injured another two when he blew up a bomb in a mini van at a checkpoint along the a highway in eastern Baghdad near the Interior Ministry.
On Sunday, police found the body of a former Iraqi Army officer at a fuel station in the center of the capital. Abbas Abdullah Fadhl had been shot to death in his car, they said.