Baghdad (ANTARA News) - Three US soldiers were killed Friday when their vehicle hit an improvised roadside bomb in the Babel governorate south of Baghdad, the US military said, on a day of isolated roadside bomb attacks and kidnappings around Iraq. Further details were not immediately given about the attack, while earlier, there were two roadside bomb attacks which had targeted Iraqi police patrols in Baghdad but missed their targets. In one incident, an explosive device targeting an Iraqi police patrol blew up in central Baghdad, wounding four civilians nearby, eyewitnesses said. The device apparently missed its target, the eyewitnesses told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. They said that the bomb struck the four victims in an area near Palestine Street through which an Iraqi police patrol had driven. An explosive device targeting another police patrol in the Al Riyadh district of Baghdad also missed its target on Friday, but no casualties were reported in that attack. In another incident, unidentified gunmen shot dead a member of the city council of Baquba north of Baghdad on Friday, an Iraqi medical source said. Gunmen opened fire on Majeed Hameed from a car, killing him instantly. Hameed was a member of the now-defunct Baath party of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, and was also a former representative of the two Baquba districts of Al-Mualemeen and Al-Katton. Meanwhile the US military bulldozed three houses in a village near Tikrit in northern Iraq in an area where it has repeatedly come under insurgent rocket attacks, an Iraqi security source said. The military sealed off the village near the town of Nahhiyat Al Alam before demolishing the houses that belonged to an Iraqi named as Saysab Awwad Shakoury. The US forces were also preparing to bulldoze a local mosque in the area, 170 kilometers north of Baghdad, the source added. The reasons behind the demolitions, that took place under US air cover, were not immediately clear. The operational centre for US forces in north-central Iraq is located in Tikrit. Elsewhere in Iraq, unidentified armed men kidnapped six Iraqi engineers along with their driver near Kirkuk on Thursday night when their car broke down on the Beiji-Kiruk highway. Captain Nozad Omar of the Kirkuk Police Department told dpa that the six engineers, from the Al Shamal Petroleum Company, and their driver were abducted near the village of Abu Khanager south of the northern city of Kirkuk. (*)

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