Provincial Police

A suicide bomber struck the heavily guarded governor's compound in a northern province during an official gathering on Saturday, killing at least two senior police commanders and injuring a number of other people, provincial officials said. Also Saturday, NATO's International Security Assistance Force reported the deaths of two service members in the south of Afghanistan, although the force did not disclose their nationalities. On Thursday, eight Americans on foot patrol in Kandahar province were killed by a pair of powerful homemade bombs, the most lethal single incident this year involving IEDs, or improvised explosive devices.

A Taliban suicide squad stormed the compound of a development group working under contract to the U.S. government on Friday, killing at least three expatriate workers, a security guard and an Afghan police officer, officials said. All six attackers also died in the predawn assault in the northern city of Kunduz. At the outset of the strike, one of the assailants blew up a sport utility vehicle at the compound's gates; the other five were killed in a gun battle that followed, provincial police said.

KABUL, Afghanistan A Taliban suicide squad stormed the compound of a U.S.-based development group in northern Afghanistan on Friday, killing at least three expatriate workers, a security guard and an Afghan police officer, officials said. All six attackers also died in the predawn assault in the city of Kunduz. One died when he blew up a sport-utility vehicle at the compound's gates at the outset of the strike, and the other five died in a subsequent gunbattle, according to provincial police.

The 26-year-old Sunni Arab man sat in the restaurant of a fashionable Baghdad hotel, his business suit covering marks where he said a power drill had penetrated his thigh and acid dissolved his calf. The former Iraqi SWAT commander had traveled to Baghdad for meetings with Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and other high-ranking officials in which he plans to provide an account of torture he says he endured on the orders of Maj. Gen. Ghanim Quraishi, the Shiite Muslim police chief of Diyala province.

Followers of radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr marched Monday south of Baghdad to protest the appointment of a provincial police chief they accuse of having links to a rival Shiite faction and to Saddam Hussein's ousted government. The demonstration in Hillah, capital of Babil province, underscored deep rivalries that threaten stability in the overwhelmingly Shiite south, generally one of the calmer parts of Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

A pedestrian blew himself up near a police convoy in eastern Afghanistan, killing four civilians and wounding 35 other people, officials said. The officers were patrolling in the city of Khowst when the bomber struck, said the deputy provincial police chief, Mohammed Zaman. In Kabul, the capital, a huge blast at a gunpowder store destroyed dozens of shops and houses, killing at least six people and wounding nine, officials said.

Police said the bodies of 36 shooting victims had been found south of Baghdad, and several Iraqis died overnight in clashes in the southern part of the country. Provincial police chief Brig. Gen. Abdel Haneen Hamoud said by telephone that the bodies of 36 men were found in a shallow river, each with a single bullet wound to the head. In the south, the clashes between rival Shiite groups apparently were triggered by differences over a draft constitution.

Hundreds of Dayak demonstrators rampaged through this provincial capital in central Borneo on Friday, setting ablaze security posts and a police truck. Officers fired warning shots to disperse the crowd. Witnesses said Indonesian police opened fire on the Dayaks as they tried to break into the compound of the provincial police chief's home. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

After democratic leaders virtually dismantled the rapacious Argentine military over the past decade, the 48,000 officers of the Buenos Aires provincial police emerged as the country's biggest armed force--and its biggest public safety problem. Among other scandals, police were accused of involvement in a bloody terrorist bombing, the mafia-style murder of a journalist, drug trafficking, even cattle rustling. So last year, a team of high-powered lawyers and academics performed radical surgery.

Investigators here have arrested two police officers in the mafia-style slaying of a magazine photographer, making an apparent breakthrough in the politically explosive case, authorities said Thursday. The arrests of the Buenos Aires provincial police officers and four other suspects came more than 10 weeks after the slaying of Jose Luis Cabezas, a photographer for the magazine Noticias. A gang abducted Cabezas on Jan. 25 as he left a party in a beach resort.