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Blast kills US soldier in Iraq as minister survives attack

* Southern Iraq oil exports suspended again

BAGHDAD: A US soldier was killed and another wounded by a roadside bomb blast south of Baghdad, while two Iraqi government employees were gunned down by militants firing from a speeding car in the northern city of Kirkuk, officials said on Thursday.

The US soldiers belonged to the Multi-National Division-Baghdad and were targeted Wednesday, the military said in a statement. The name of the soldier who was killed is being withheld pending next-of-kin notification. At least 2,237 US military personnel have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count

In Kirkuk, gunmen in a red Opel assassinated a senior official of Iraq’s anti-corruption commission and the deputy director of a state-run food stuff company in separate attacks Thursday, said police Capt. Farhad Talabani. Anti-corruption official Othman Majeed Rasheed, a 51-year-old Turkoman, was working to from his home to his nearby office in southern Kirkuk, 290 kilometres north of Baghdad, when he was killed by a hail of gunfire, Talabani said.

Shortly after, the same group of gunmen shot dead Jomaa Rasheed, a Kurd who is the deputy director of the state-run company for food stuffs, in the same area, Talabani said. The two victims were unrelated.

Police believe the men were killed by the same masked gunmen who launched similar attacks on Jan. 17, targeting another Kirkuk office of the anti-corruption watchdog, known as the Integrity Commission, and offices for the Kurdistan Peoples Party, killing two people and wounding three. North of Baghdad, three Iraqi soldiers were killed and four wounded by another roadside bomb on Wednesday afternoon, police Lt Amir Al-Ahbabi said.

The attack happened in the Ishaki area on the Baghdad-Mosul highway, about 55 miles north of the Iraqi capital.

A roadside bomb hit an armed convoy carrying Iraqi Industry Minister Osama Abdel-Aziz Al- Najafi on Thursday, killing three bodyguards but leaving him unharmed, his ministry said. Ministry spokeswoman Dhuha Mohammed said the convoy was hit near the town of Balad, 90 km north of Baghdad. The blast also wounded another of Najafi’s guards, she said. Mohammed said the minister, a Sunni, had been travelling home to Mosul in northern Iraq for the weekend. Senior government officials often travel by air because of the threat of roadside bombs.

Crude oil exports from southern Iraq were suspended on Thursday for the second time this week following a storm in the Gulf, oil industry and port terminal officials said.

“The two offshore terminals suspended operations starting from 0700am,” a port official said. “Eight ships are now waiting outside the terminals to take on their loads of crude oil.”

Another four tankers are loaded and ready to go but cannot due to the large waves. They include a ship carrying one million barrels at the Khor Amaya terminal and three tankers carrying three million barrels each at Basra. An official with the Southern Oil Company confirmed the suspension, but added that oil shipments to the internal Iraqi market were unaffected. agencies

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