Baghdad  - Three consecutive explosions rocked Baghdad on Sunday, leaving at least one person dead and at least 20 people wounded, local media reported.

Early Sunday morning, police sources told the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency, a bomb blast injured two civilians on a main thoroughfare in Baghdad's al-Karada district.

Later in the day, a second explosion killed an Iraqi man and wounded at least 14 other civilians in the western Baghdad district of al-Qahira, the news agency reported.

Soon after, a car bomb exploded in the Mansour district of western Baghdad, injuring at least four people.

In an apparently unrelated incident in northern Iraq, unknown gunmen on Sunday killed an Iraqi policemen and captured another, along with his father, VOI reported.

The gunmen seized the two from the Sinjar district of Iraq's ethnically divided Nineveh province, not far from the border with Syria, and 120 km west of Mosul, the provincial capital, and 400 kilometres north of Baghdad.

The area, while predominantly Sunni, is among the most ethnically diverse in Iraq.

Most Sunnis boycotted the 2005 provincial council elections, but preliminary results from January's elections announced Thursday showed the Sunni nationalist Hadba coalition, founded on a platform to end Kurdish rule over the province, had a commanding 48.4 per cent of the vote. dpa