Car Bombs Target Churches

(CNN.com) – Ten people were killed and more than 40 wounded in the attacks in Baghdad , according to the U.S. military. Iraqi police put the number of wounded at 46. In Mosul , Iraqi Police Gen. Mohammad Kairi Barhawi said one person was killed and 11 wounded when a car bomb exploded outside a church as worshippers were leaving about 7 p.m. (11 a.m. ET). Barhawi called the perpetrators “criminals and terrorists,” and said Iraqis would remain unified against them. Lt. Col. James Hutton, a spokesman for the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, said four explosions occurred Sunday evening in Baghdad — two in the Karada district, east of the fortified Green Zone, and two in the southern neighborhoods of New Baghdad and Dura. The largest was in Karada, in central Baghdad , where a car bomb exploded outside a church, leaving a crater more than 5 feet wide. Karada has several churches for Iraq ‘s Christian minority, which makes up about 3 percent of the country’s population. Police and emergency workers responding to the first blast, which occurred about 6 p.m. (10 a.m. ET), discovered a second car they suspected had been rigged as a bomb. The explosives in that vehicle detonated before it could be disarmed, they said. Earlier bomb blasts Sunday killed four more people in Mosul and two in Baghdad , Iraqi police said. Another car bomb in Mosul wounded 32 others when it exploded outside the Sumer police station in a Palestinian neighborhood, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. Also Sunday, a roadside bomb killed a U.S. soldier in northern Iraq and wounded two others, the U.S. military announced. The death in the city of Samarra brings the number U.S. troops killed in the Iraq war to 914, with 678 from hostile action and 235 from nonhostile activity, according to the U.S. military. Sunday’s violence comes just days after at least 70 people were killed in Baquba, when a suicide bomber drove a minibus into a marketplace near a police station.