MOSUL: A suicide bomber killed at least 13 people and wounded 72 yesterday in a Sunni Muslim mosque in northern Iraq whose imam had criticised Al Qaeda, security officials said.
Police said the bomber attacked the mosque in Tal Afar in Nineveh province, 420km northwest of Baghdad, during prayers. An official said the attacker shot dead a local judge praying there before detonating the explosives.
Suicide attacks are the hallmark of Sunni Islamist groups and it is rare for them to target Sunni rather than Shi'ite places of worship. The Tal Afar mosque was probably attacked because its imam had spoken out against Al Qaeda and also to kill the judge, the official said.
Witness Qassim Ahmed, wounded by flying glass, said from hospital: "I came to the mosque late and when I went to enter, I heard shooting. Seconds later, there was a big explosion."
Nineveh is seen as the last major holdout of insurgents who have been largely driven out of Baghdad and western Anbar province by Sunni tribal sheikhs allied to US forces.
Tal Afar, mainly home to minority Turkmen Shi'ites, has been hit by many bombings.
Meanwhile, large crowds of supporters of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr voted to select candidates to run in Iraq's election in January.
The bloc, which has 30 MPs in parliament, is allied with the Shiite-dominated Iraqi National Alliance, which will face off against Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki's State of Law coalition in the election.
Sadrist officials said that by noon, more than a million people had cast their ballots in the primaries, although the figure could not be independently verified.
l An Iraqi former legislator who fled after being accused of ordering a 2007 bomb attack on the country's parliament has been arrested in Malaysia for using a fake passport, a top official said in Kuala Lumpur. Mohammed Al Daini, a Sunni who has insisted he was not involved in the bombing, which left eight people dead, has been in hiding since Iraq's parliament voted to lift his immunity.
in February.
"The aim of this exercise is to engender in people loyalty to parliament," said Hazim Al Araji, the Sadrist movement's chief in the northern Baghdad neighbourhood of Kadhimiyah.
The ballot was being held across the country, with the exception of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan and the predominantly Sunni Arab provinces of Al Anbar, in the west, and Nineveh, in the north.
