Baghdad Blasts

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Blasts at Baghdad's police academy and in the northern city of Mosul killed 29 people and wounded dozens more Monday, hours after a roadside bomb wounded a senior Iraqi official, police said.

Violence has fallen sharply over the last year as successive security crackdowns dealt insurgent groups heavy blows, but officials say militants are now concentrating their efforts on attention-grabbing attacks ahead of elections next year.

People were queuing at the back entrance of the police academy in east Baghdad to enroll when a car bomb exploded, followed minutes later by a suicide bomb attack, police said. Fifteen people were killed and 45 wounded.

Shortly after, a suicide car bomber killed 14 people and wounded 30 in Mosul, the last holdout of al Qaeda and other Sunni Arab insurgent groups in Iraq that once fought U.S. soldiers across swathes of the country.

The attack in Mosul targeted an Iraqi police and U.S. military joint patrol, they said.

Monday's blasts came as Iraq tries to prepare its security forces to take over responsibility from U.S. troops, who under a security pact passed by parliament Thursday will have to withdraw from towns by mid-2009 and leave Iraq by end-2011.

The Iraqi government is also in the process of taking responsibility for largely Sunni neighborhood patrolmen -- who number some 100,000 across Iraq -- from the U.S. military, while also preparing for provincial elections on January 31.

The attacks are aimed at reigniting sectarian bloodshed between the minority Sunni Arabs who dominated Iraq under former dictator Saddam Hussein and Shi'ites who are now in control.

In a separate attack hours earlier, Major-General Mudhar al-Mawla, who is dealing with the transfer of mainly Sunni patrolmen to government control, was targeted by a roadside bomb as his convoy left his home in the Sulaikh district of northern Baghdad. The bomb killed three people and wounded 13 others, police said.

Mawla was also seriously wounded, they said.

Baghdad security spokesman Major-General Qassim Moussawi said only one bodyguard had been killed in the blast and six people wounded. Mawla was only slightly wounded, he added.

(Writing by Mohammed Abbas; Editing by Louise Ireland and Michael Christie)