Baghdad - Four Iraqis were killed on Thursday as violence continued in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, police there said.

Two policemen were fatally shot in two separate gun battles with insurgents in the east of the city, police told the German Press Agency dpa, without giving details.

In a third firefight, in the Yarmuk neighbourhood of western Mosul, Iraqi soldiers killed one insurgent and arrested five others after coming under attack, police said.

Mosul security officials added that they had found the corpse of a man who had apparently been executed by shots to the head and heart in a valley to the south of the city.

Mosul and its environs, roughly 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, is among the most ethnically and religiously diverse areas of Iraq.

Despite successive security pushes that police say have netted hundreds of suspected insurgents, the city and the surrounding countryside continue to see deadly, near-daily attacks against civilians and Iraqi security forces. (dpa)