Fresh outbreaks of violence in Iraq have left at least eight people dead, police said. In one attack, gunmen broke into a house in Baghdad and killed five people including a police officer, his wife and their two children. In another incident, gunmen kidnapped eight policemen at a checkpoint near Ramadi, west of Baghdad, officials said. The attacks came despite appeals for calm after the worst day of sectarian violence in the country for months. At least 60 people died in three bombings in Sunni Muslim areas in and around Baghdad on Friday. The bombings followed deadly attacks on Shia targets across Iraq. Police said attackers stormed a house in the al-Rasheed district of Baghdad early on Saturday and shot dead anti-terrorism police Captain Adnan Ibrahim, his wife and two children, aged eight and 10. The gunmen then killed another policeman as they fled the area. In Basra, Sunni cleric Assad Nassir was shot dead as he left his house, police said. Meanwhile, in the northern city of Mosul two Iraqi soldiers were killed and two others wounded by a roadside bomb, officials said. On Friday, at least 41 people died when two bombs detonated outside a Sunni mosque in Baquba, about 50km (30 miles) north of Baghdad. Another eight people were killed at a Sunni funeral in Madain and 14 more in two blasts in western Baghdad. Security forces in Baquba said they had arrested several suspected militants during raids on Saturday. Correspondents said the recent spike in violence is reminiscent of the retaliatory attacks between Sunnis and Shias that pushed the country to the brink of civil war in 2006-2007. The surge of violence in the past month began after an army raid on a Sunni anti-government protest camp near the northern town of Hawija that left 50 people dead. The demonstrators accused the government of targeting the Sunni community.
