Baghdad - At least 17 people were killed in two car bomb attacks in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad neighbourhood of Sadr City, the satellite news network al-Arabiya reported Wednesday.

It was the latest in a series of deadly attacks targeting Shiite Muslims in Iraq. Suicide bombers killed more than 120 people over the space of two days last week.

In Mosul, some 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, police found the body of a beheaded girl in the city's eastern district of al-Karama, police there told the German Press Agency dpa on Wednesday.

Baghdad - Iraqi police have confirmed that a man they detained last week is the mysterious "emir" of an umbrella group including al-Qaeda in Iraq, an Iraqi security spokesman said Tuesday. Baghdad security spokesman Qassim Atta told the al-Arabiya satellite news channel that investigations had confirmed that the man Iraqi police arrested in Baghdad last Thursday was Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the shadowy leader of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq.

Baghdad - Iraqi Prime Minster Nuri al-Maliki is expected in London on Wednesday, the latest stop in his tour of Europe to drum up investment in his country, local media reported. The Iraqi premier, who is traveling at the head of high-level delegation of Iraqi ministers and senior officials, is expected to sign a memorandum of understanding with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to strengthen Iraqi-British cooperation in a number fields, Baghdad's daily al-Sabah reported on Tuesday.

Baghdad - Two brothers, one of them a policeman, were fatally shot on Monday in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, police said.

Police said the pair were gunned down in the district of al-Arabi, in eastern Mosul, some 400 kilometres north of Baghdad - which remains among the most dangerous areas of Iraq, despite a series of security pushes by Iraqi and US forces.

Monday's deaths follow a US shooting in Kut, the capital of the predominantly Shiite province of Wasit, southeast of Baghdad, on Sunday, which killed the wife and brother of a local dignitary.

Baghdad - At least 30 people were killed and as many as 100 others were injured when two suicide bombers struck a Shiite shrine in Baghdad on Friday, witnesses said.

Witnesses told the German Press Agency dpa that a man detonated explosives strapped to his body at the door to the shrine to a revered, eighth-century Shiite imam in the northwestern Baghdad neighbourhood of Kadhimiya. Soon after, a woman blew herself up at the woman's entrance to the shrine.

Baghdad  - In a further sign of deteriorating relations between Iraq's government and Sunni militias enlisted to fight insurgents, militiamen in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, left their posts on Thursday, following their leader's resignation.

Militia leader Karim Ismail al-Zubai, better known as "Abu Maruf," submitted his resignation to the government and to the national head of the Awakening Councils, a senior source in the Iraqi government told the German Press Agency dpa on Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity.