Baghdad  - At least 17 people were killed in attacks across Iraq on Monday, police told the German Press Agency dpa and local media.

In the most deadly attack, a roadside bomb ripped through a bus in Saneyya, 160 kilometres south of Baghdad, killing at least six passengers and injuring two others, police told the Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

That attack followed a suicide bombing west of Ramadi, in Iraq's Sunni heartland. Two policemen were killed when a man driving a tanker truck near a police station detonated explosives rigged to the vehicle, police told Aswat al-Iraq.

The driver was also killed, police west of Ramadi in Iraq's Sunni heartland, told Baghdad's Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

The truck bombing came amid Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's attempts to forge a new coalition across sectarian lines, following the departure of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and followers of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr from the ruling coalition in late August.

The prime minister, a Shiite Muslim, campaigned among Sunni tribal leaders in Salah al-Din province on Sunday. The Baghdad daily al- Sabbah last week reported that al-Maliki planned to announce a new coalition including a patchwork of Sunni tribal leaders on Monday, ahead of general elections scheduled to take place in January.

To the north of the country, police told dpa that eight people had been killed in a fresh wave of attacks in and around Mosul.

A bomb blast killed three police officers and injured two others patrolling the city late Monday afternoon, police said. In a separate incident on the opposite side of the city, gunmen fatally shot a woman.

Earlier, police on a routine patrol of the road between Mosul and the nearby town of Tel Afar found four bodies of Kurdish militiamen with multiple gunshot wounds to the head, Aswat al-Iraq reported. The police brought the bodies to Tel Afar for return to their families.

Mosul and its environs, roughly 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, are among the most ethnically and religiously diverse areas in Iraq. The area also remains one of the most prone to violence, subject to near-daily, deadly attacks.

Political tensions have been particularly high in recent months, as the Arab-nationalist provincial government elected in January has sought to bring in Arab-Iraqi forces to replace Kurdish peshmerga militiamen who continue to police the eastern region of the province bordering the semi-autonomous Kurdish region.

On Sunday, a child was killed and four others were wounded when an improvised explosive device exploded in a garbage dump in the western Mosul neighbourhood of al-Tank, police told the Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

Police on Sunday told the German Press Agency dpa that a woman who worked as a nurse at a nearby hospital had been abducted from her home in the city.

The abduction came a day after insurgents "laid siege" to the Tel Atba region, 80 kilometres west of the city, preventing trucks from bringing supplies to the region. The move came after residents refused to work with the insurgents, Aswat al-Iraq reported, citing the leader of the local, government-allied, Sahwa, or "Awakening," militia. dpa