Car Bombs in Northern Iraq Kill 5, Wounds 79

Two car bombs Friday, targeting a provincial councilor and a police officer north of Baghdad, killed five people and wounded 79 others, many of them women and children, police said.

The five dead came in a bombing in the town of Tuz Khurmatu, which targeted the home of Niazar Nomaroglu, a Shiite Turkmen councilor in the mainly Sunni Arab Salaheddin province, police Colonel Hussein al Bayati said.

Women and children were among the 47 people wounded in the 3:45pm local time bombing, which severely damaged several surrounding houses as well as Nomaroglu's home, Bayati said.

It was unclear whether the councilor was among the casualties.

The headquarters of Salaheddin province are located in the heavily Sunni Arab-populated Tikrit, hometown of executed dictator Saddam Hussein, but the province also contains Kurdish and Shiite Turkmen minorities, particularly on its eastern margins.

Earlier Friday, a car bomb targeting the home of police Captain Mustafa al Tamimi in Baquba wounded 32 people, 20 of them women or children, a spokesman for the city's operations command said.

"His house was completely destroyed," the spokesman said.

"Three of his children, his wife and two brothers were among the wounded. The rest included nine women and seven children."

The police officer himself escaped injury, as he was at the mosque attending the main weekly Muslim prayers.

Baquba is the capital of the ethnically divided Diyala province, which became one of the bastions of Al Qaeda in Iraq.