BAGHDAD: Iran closed its border with northern Iraq yesterday in protest at the detention of an Iranian by US troops, a day after it confirmed shelling Iraqi rearbases of separatist Kurdish rebels. "All five entry points on the border between Iran and the (Iraqi) Kurdish region have been closed by the Iranian authorities from today," said a spokesman for the autonomous Kurdish regional government. Iran confirmed it had shut the border following the detention of Mahmudi Farhadi by US forces on Thursday.
Just hours after Tehran's border closure, a suicide bomber killed 26 people including Baquba police chief in a mosque compound where local Shi'ite and Sunni Arab leaders were holding reconciliation talks.
Two other senior police officers were killed while tribal leaders were among 50 people wounded in the attack in Diyala. Police said there were reports the governor of Diyala had also been wounded.
In other violence-related incidents, more than 10 people were reportedly killed across Iraq, including six in a suicide truck bombing in Tal Afar.
Separately, a US soldier died of wounds sustained in an insurgent attack in Salaheddin yesterday, the military said. The US military also announced that coalition forces have arrested a kidnapper and detained four other "criminals" supported by Iran in Baghdad.
Iraq, meanwhile, said no action would be taken against US private security firm Blackwater over a shooting in which 11 people were killed until after a joint investigation with US officials.
In Washington, the US Senate was expected to vote as early as today on a Bosnia-style plan to subdivide Iraq on ethnic lines, touted by backers as the sole hope of forging a federal state out of sectarian strife.
Back in Baghdad, a court trying Saddam Hussein's cousin Ali Hassan Al Majeed for crimes against humanity heard yesterday that he ordered guards to execute a group of 200 people as he stamped out a Shi'ite uprising in 1991.
In yet another development, a woman from Baghdad, who was the only confirmed case of cholera in the Iraqi capital has died, bringing the number of deaths from the disease in the country to 11, the World Health Organisation said.
