At least five killed after mortar attacks against Iranian dissidents in Iraq

Mortar attacks on an exile camp housing Iranian dissidents near Baghdad killed a number of people early on Saturday, an Iraqi security official and a United Nations spokeswoman said.
The mortars “led to a number of deaths and injuries among the residents,” said Eliana Nabaa, spokeswoman for the U.N. mission in Iraq. “Also a number of Iraqi policemen were injured… We cannot confirm exactly how many.”

An interior ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, put the toll at five dead and 40 wounded.

The Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) said in a statement that six people were killed in 35 rockets and mortars.

Nabaa said U.N. special envoy Martin Kobler had asked Iraqi authorities to “promptly conduct an investigation into this,” and added, “we have our monitors on the ground to follow-up.”

She said Iraqi officials had said that “all those who were injured were hospitalised immediately.”

The mortar rounds struck at a transit camp known as Camp Liberty where some 3,000 residents who members of the MEK were moved on Iraq’s insistence, from their historic paramilitary camp of the 1980s — Camp Ashraf.

On Friday, at least 33 people were killed after a spate of car bombs in Shiite areas of Iraq, including two blasts minutes apart at a popular bird market.

The bloodshed came as tens of thousands of people in mostly Sunni parts of the country renewed rallies calling for Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to quit.

The latest attacks, which also wounded more than 100, mainly targeted marketplaces that are often crowded on Fridays, the weekly holiday in Iraq, and took the death toll from a week of violence to more than 100.

Source: Alarabiya