Nine people killed in violent attacks across Iraq - Press TV

In the first incident, gunmen killed four policemen near the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad on Wednesday.

Armed men also shot dead Captain Muntasser Abdul Razzaq, an intelligence officer, in the city of Mahmudiyah, according to an Iraqi Interior Ministry official.

Later in the day, gunmen attacked a police checkpoint in northern city of Mosul and killed a policeman.

In central Iraq, two roadside bombs killed two soldiers and wounded another one in Abu Ghraib area, west of the capital.

A department head in the College of Agriculture on the Tikrit University campus was killed by a magnetic bomb.

And three prison guards and an inmate were injured after another prisoner belonging to al-Qaeda blew himself up in a prison in central Baghdad.

"The prisoner was able to gather the explosives over a number of days," an Interior Ministry official said, without providing details on the source of the explosives. The bomber survived the bombing and has been taken to a nearby hospital.

Tensions and sporadic shootings and bombings are still common across Iraq although violence in the country has ebbed from its climax in 2006 and 2007.

DB/MHB