Death toll from bomb attacks in Iraq's Salahudin province on Tuesday rose to 10 after the police retrieved eight bodies from a bombed house of a police officer, a provincial police source told Xinhua.
Eight family members of Major Qais al-Rashid, a company commander in the provincial rapid reaction police force, were killed and two more are still under the debris of his house which collapsed after a bomb explosion earlier Tuesday in the provincial capital city of Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, a source from Salahudin operations command said on condition of anonymity.
A six-month-old child survived the attack after the rescue team pulled him out of the debris alive, the source said.
Also in Tikrit, a bomb exploded in the house of Lieutenant Colonel Khalid al-Baiyati, commander of the provincial rapid reaction police force, wounding two of his family members. Baiyati survived the attack unhurt as he was not at home when the blast occurred, the source said.
Meanwhile, two policemen were killed and four people wounded in a roadside bomb blast near a police patrol in the city of Samarra, 110 km north of Baghdad, the source said.
In addition, a member of a government-backed Awakening Council group, also known as Sahwa, was wounded in a bomb explosion in the city of Baiji, some 200 km north of Baghdad, he added.
The Awakening Council group consists of armed groups, including some powerful anti-U.S. Sunni insurgent groups, who turned their rifles against the al-Qaida network after the latter exercised indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.
Salahudin, located in northern Iraq, is mainly a Sunni province. Its capital city of Tikrit is the hometown of the former President Saddam Hussein.
Violence and sporadic high-profile attacks are still common in Iraqi cities, shaping a setback to the efforts of the Iraqi government to restore normalcy in the country after violence-torn Iraq held its parliamentary elections about seven months ago.