Up to 12 people, including four policemen, were killed by a suicide car bomber near a US-Iraqi base in Baghdad yesterday and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil servant in the second such murder in as many days.

The US-led administration has said insurgents may step up attacks before and after the occupation formally ends on June 30 to disrupt the handover and discredit Iraq?s new government. While the new bloodshed seemed to bear out that prediction, two foreign hostages, a Turk and an Egyptian, were freed after what a mediator called talks with men close to their captors.

Police at the scene of the car bombing said their colleagues had tried to stop a suspicious vehicle hurtling toward an Iraqi military college in southeast Baghdad, where many US soldiers are also based. Abdul Razzak Kadhem, a senior police officer, said two police cars had intercepted the vehicle, which then exploded, destroying one police car and badly damaging another.

Targeted killings

The US military, condemning what it called a ?random, senseless act of violence,? said the blast had killed eight Iraqi civilians and four policemen, and wounded 13 people. Kadhem said earlier four policemen and two civilians had died. Four policemen were wounded.

Two charred bodies could be seen in the burned wreckage of one police car. All that remained of the bomber?s car was a blackened engine in the road. Several civilian vehicles were damaged. Blood stained the driver?s seat of a white pick-up.

?One car was blown across the street,? said Abdel Hasan al-Jabbar, an off-duty civil defense worker. ?The man inside had blood pouring from the top of his head.? Guerrillas frequently target police and other Iraqis whom they accuse of collaborating with the US-led occupation.

The Iraqi civil servant, Kamal al-Jarrah, 63, who headed the education ministry?s cultural relations department, was shot in his garden after stepping out of his house in the western Ghazaliya district of the capital to go to work.

The veteran bureaucrat died in hospital, Abdul Khaliq al-Amiri, secretary to the education minister, told Reuters. Jarrah?s wife, who was with him in the garden, was unhurt.

In a similarly precise attack on Saturday, gunmen in a car killed Bassam Qubba, the foreign ministry?s undersecretary for multinational affairs and international organizations.

Last month, a suicide bombing killed Izzedin Salim, the head of Iraq?s now-dissolved Governing Council, and another council member survived an ambush south of the capital.

The Foreign Ministry said Qubba?s killing bore ?the hallmarks of leftover supporters of Saddam Hussein?s evil regime.? Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said the interim government ?will not be scared or intimidated by Saddamists.?

The hostage mediator, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters the Egyptian and Turk had been freed yesterday, after negotiations the previous day. He gave no details.

On June 2, Al Arabiya television aired footage of an armed Iraqi threatening to kill the pair if Egypt and Turkey did not denounce the US-led occupation of Iraq. ?Death will be the fate of these people if their governments don?t condemn the occupation,? said a masked gunman as two men crouched in front of him holding up their passports.

Anti-US groups have abducted dozens of foreigners in Iraq. Most have been freed. Three, including a Lebanese national kidnapped last week, are known to have been killed. A suspected rocket attack on the sprawling compound of the US-British administration in Baghdad prompted warning sirens yesterday, but nobody was hurt, the US military said.

In northern Iraq, gunmen killed Iyad Khorshid, a Kurdish religious leader, overnight in the latest of a series of murders in the ethnically divided city of Kirkuk, police said. The four gunmen had broken into the house of Khorshid, who had preached tolerance and condemned anti-US violence.

Jalil Mohammad, a policeman who was a local government official in Kirkuk during Saddam Hussein?s Baathist rule, was also shot dead in his home overnight, police said. Six policemen were wounded in Kirkuk when their night patrol was ambushed. The attackers escaped.

Tension is running high in the oil-rich city where rivalries between Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen communities have been sharpened by uncertainty over Iraq?s political future.

Alistair Lyon