The New Nation - Internet Edition

AP, Baghdad

The U.S. military says an American soldier has been killed in an attack on his patrol in Baghdad.

The military says in a statement that the attack happened at about 11 a.m. on Sunday. It says the patrol came under small arms fire.

The statement says the name of the soldier is being withheld pending notification of family and a U.S. Department of Defense release.

Meanwhile, Insurgents killed at least eight people and wounded dozens in a spate of attacks across Iraq on Sunday, including two suicide car bombings in two northern cities, security officials said.

A bomber slammed his explosives-filled car into a checkpoint in the northern oil city of Kirkuk where a group of youngsters had gathered to be taken to a police recruitment centre, said local deputy police chief Major General Torhan Yussef.

"Two people were killed in the attack and 24 were wounded," he told AFP.

Another suicide bomber detonated his explosives-filled vehicle near a police building in the northern city of Mosul and killed two people, including a policeman, a local police officer said. Forty people were also wounded in the attack, including 15 policemen, he added.

US and Iraqi forces claim Mosul is the last urban bastion of Al-Qaeda fighters.

Three people were killed and six wounded when a roadside bomb blasted a minibus in the village of Al-Murjana, northwest of Baquba, the capital of Diyala province, police said.

The province north of Baghdad is a stronghold of Al-Qaeda fighters.

In the capital itself, gunmen shot dead Brigadier General Adel Abbas, a senior officer in the interior ministry's criminal investigation department, as he was driving to work, security officials said. His driver was wounded.

Insurgents also tried to kill Ghasan Ridha, a director in the finance ministry, by planting a bomb in his car in Baghdad. Ridha was wounded in the attack.

In Baghdad's Waziriyah neighbourhood, seven people including three Iraqi soldiers were wounded when their patrol was hit by a roadside bomb near the Turkish embassy, security officials said.

And in the north of the city, a similar attack targeting a police patrol wounded five more people including a policeman, they added.